African Adventures: 2

The second volume of Haggard's African adventures—featuring three gripping stories

Rider Haggard's affection for and affinity with the 'Dark Continent' is well known. His adventures featuring Allan Quatermain—the little white hunter, trader and explorer are justly famous and appear as a collected set in their entirety from Leonaur. For some that generous helping of African adventures simply will not be sufficient. Although Haggard was a prolific author not all of his material is familiar or available to those who would enjoy it. Leonaur has gathered together Haggard's 'other' adventures set in Africa into one collection of four books available in soft cover and hard cover with dust jacket for collectors.
The second volume of the four volume collection of Rider Haggard's other African adventures contains three pieces—two novels and a novelette—to please those who enjoy this highly entertaining and expert author of the African world of fact and fantasy. Perhaps the highest accolade one can give to the first novel, 'The People of the Mist' is that but for the absence of Quatermain himself it bears all the ingredients that made that character’s adventures so appealing! 'Black Heart and White Heart' is yet another tale where Haggard takes us inside the life the Zulu people themselves and in 'The Wizard' a group of missionaries must overcome the many obstacles and dangers of the African interior and its fierce and magical peoples. Altogether another bumper crop of Haggard reading pleasure.

Three months had passed since that day, when Juanna declared her unalterable determination to accompany Leonard upon his search for the treasures of the People of the Mist.<br>
It was evening, and a party of travellers were encamped on the side of a river that ran through a great and desolate plain. They were a small party, three white people, namely, Leonard, Francisco, and Juanna, fifteen of the Settlement men under the leadership of Peter—that same headman who had been rescued from the slave camp—the dwarf, Otter, and Juanna's old nurse, Soa.<br>
For twelve weeks they had travelled almost without intermission with Soa for their guide, steering continually northward and westward. First they followed the course of the river in canoes for ten days or more; then, leaving the main stream, they paddled for three weeks up that of a tributary called Mavuae, which ran for many miles along the foot of a great range of mountains named Manganja. Here they made but slow progress because of the frequent rapids, which necessitated the porterage of the canoes over broken ground, and for considerable distances. At length they came to a rapid which was so long and so continuous that regretfully enough they were obliged to abandon the canoes altogether and proceed on foot.<br>
The dangers of their water journey had been many, but they were nothing compared with those that now environed them, and in addition to bodily perils, they must face the daily and terrible fatigue of long marches through an unknown country, cumbered as they were with arms and other absolutely necessary baggage. The country through which they were now passing was named Marengi, a land uninhabited by man, the home of herds of countless game.<br>
On they went northward and upward through a measureless waste; plain succeeded plain in endless monotony, distance gave place to distance, and ever there were more beyond.<br>
Gradually the climate grew colder: they were traversing a portion of the unexplored plateau that separates southern from central Africa. Its loneliness was awful, and the bearers began to murmur, saying that they had reached the end of the world, and were walking over its edge. Indeed they had only two comforts in this part of their undertaking; the land lay so high that none of them were stricken by fever, and they could not well miss the road, which, if Soa was to be believed, ran along the banks of the river that had its source in the territories of the People of the Mist.<br>
The adventures that befell them were endless, but it is not proposed to describe them in detail. Once they starved for three days, being unable to find game. On another occasion they fell in with a tribe of bushmen who harassed them with poisoned arrows, killing two of their best men, and were only prevented from annihilating them through the terror inspired by their firearms, which they took for magical instruments.<br>
Escaping from the bushmen, they entered a forest country which teemed with antelope and also with lions, that night by night they must keep at bay as best they could. Then came several days' march through a plain strewn with sharp stones which lamed most of the party; and after this eighty or a hundred miles of dreary rolling veldt, clothed with rank grass just now brown with the winter frosts, that caught their feet at every step.<br>
Now at length they halted on the boundary of the land of the People of the Mist. There before them, not more than a mile away, towered a huge cliff or wall of rock, stretching across the plain like a giant step, far as the eye could reach, and varying from seven hundred to a thousand feet in height. Down the surface of this cliff the river flowed in a series of beautiful cascades.
Before they had finished their evening meal of buck's flesh the moon was up, and by its light the three white people stared hopelessly at this frowning natural fortification, wondering if they could climb it, and wondering also what terrors awaited them upon its further side. They were silent that night, for a great weariness had overcome them, and if the truth must be known, all three of them regretted that they had ever undertaken this mad adventure.<br>
Leonard glanced to the right, where, some fifty paces away, the Settlement men were crouched round the fire. They also were silent, and it was easy to see that the heart was out of them.<br>
"Won't somebody say something?" said Juanna at last with a rather pathetic attempt at playfulness. How could she be cheerful, poor girl, when her feet were sore and her head was aching, and she wished that she were dead, almost?
"Yes," answered Leonard, "I will say that I admire your pluck. I should not have thought it possible for any young lady to have gone through the last two months, and 'come out smiling' at the end of them."<br>
"Oh, I am quite happy. Don't trouble about me," she said, laughing as merrily as though there were no such things as sore feet and headaches in the world.
"Are you?" said Leonard, "then I envy you, that is all. Here comes old Soa, and Otter after her. I wonder what is the matter now. Something disagreeable, I suppose." <br>
Soa arrived and squatted down in front of them, her tall spare form and somewhat sullen face looking more formidable than usual in the moonlight. Otter was beside her, and though he stood and she sat, their heads were almost on a level.