A TALE OF THREE LIONS

by H. Rider Haggard




CHAPTER I

THE INTEREST ON TEN SHILLINGS

Most of you will have heard that Allan Quatermain, who was one of the
party that discovered King Solomon's mines some little time ago, and
who afterwards came to live in England near his friend Sir Henry
Curtis. He went back to the wilderness again, as these old hunters
almost invariably do, on one pretext or another.[*] They cannot endure
civilization for very long, its noise and racket and the omnipresence
of broad-clothed humanity proving more trying to their nerves than the
dangers of the desert. I think that they feel lonely here, for it is a
fact that is too little understood, though it has often been stated,
that there is no loneliness like the loneliness of crowds, especially
to those who are unaccustomed to them. "What is there in the world,"
old Quatermain would say, "so desolate as to stand in the streets of a
great city and listen to the footsteps falling, falling, multitudinous
as the rain, and watch the white line of faces as they hurry past, you
know not whence, you know not whither? They come and go, their eyes
meet yours with a cold stare, for a moment their features are written
on your mind, and then they are gone for ever. You will never see them
again; they will never see you again; they come up out of the unknown,
and presently they once more vanish into the unknown, taking their