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Good asked me to.
    Second reason: Because I am laid up here at Durban with the pain and trouble in my left leg. Ever since that confounded lion got hold of me I have been liable to it, and its being rather bad just now makes me limp more than ever. There must be some poison in a lion’s teeth, otherwise how is it that when your wounds are healed they break out again, generally, mark you, at the same time of year that you got your mauling? It is a hard thing that when one has shot sixty-five lions as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing, and putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don’t like that. This is by the way.
    Third reason: Because I want my boy Harry, who is over there at the hospital in London studying to become a doctor, to have something to amuse him and keep him out of mischief for a week or so. Hospital work must sometimes pall and get rather dull, for even of cutting up dead bodies there must come satiety, and as this history won’t be dull, whatever else it may be, it may put a little life into things for a day or two while he is reading it.
    Fourth reason and last: Because I am going to tell the strangest story that I know of. It may seem a queer thing to say that, especially considering that there is no woman in it—except Foulata. Stop, though! there is Gagaoola, if she was a woman and not a fiend. But she was a hundred at least, and therefore not marriageable, so I don’t count her. At any rate, I can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the whole history. Well I had better come to the yoke. It’s a stiff place, and I feel as though I were bogged up to the axle. But “sutjes, suties,” b as the Boers say (I’m sure I don’t know how they spell it), softly does it. A strong team will come through at last, that is if they ain’t too poor. You will never do anything with poor oxen. Now to begin.
    I, Allan Quatermain, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman, make oath and say—That’s how I began my deposition before the magistrate, about poor Khiva’s and Ventvögel’s sad deaths; 3 but somehow it doesn’t seem quite the right way to begin a book. And, besides, am I a gentleman? What is a gentleman? I don’t quite know, and yet I have had to do with niggers—no, I’ll scratch that word “niggers” out, for I don’t like it. I’ve known natives who are, and so you’ll say, Harry, my boy, before you’re done with this tale, and I have known mean whites with lots of money and fresh out from home, too, who ain’t. Well, at any rate, I was born a gentleman, though I’ve been nothing but a poor travelling trader and hunter all my life. Whether I have remained so I know not, you must judge of that. Heaven knows I’ve tried. I’ve killed many men in my time, but I have never slain wantonly or stained my hand in innocent blood, only in self-defence. The Almighty gave us our lives, and I suppose he meant us to defend them, at least I have always acted on that, and I hope it won’t be brought up against me when my clock strikes. There, there, it is a cruel and a wicked world, and for a timid man I have been mixed up in a deal of slaughter. I can’t tell the rights of it, but at any rate I have never stolen, though I once cheated a Kafir c out of a herd of cattle. But then he had done me a dirty turn, and it has troubled me ever since into the bargain.
    Well it’s eighteen months or so ago since I first met Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and it was in this way. I had been up elephant hunting beyond Bamangwato, 4 and had had bad luck. Everything went wrong that trip, and to top up with I got the fever badly. So soon as I was well enough I trekked down to the Diamond Fields, 5 sold such ivory as I had, and also my waggon and oxen, discharged my hunters, and took the post-cart to the Cape. After spending a week in Cape Town, finding that they overcharged me at the hotel, and