King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard Read Free Book Online Page B

used to extract from a country long since lapsed into the darkest barbarism took a great hold upon my imagination, when suddenly he said to me, ”Lad, did you ever hear of the Suliman Mountains up to the north-west of the Mashukulumbwe country?” I told him I never had. “Ah, well,” he said, “that was where Solomon really had his mines, his diamond mines, I mean.”
    4 “ ‘How do you know that?’ I asked.
    “ ‘Know it; why what is “Suliman” but a corruption of Solomon! i and, besides, an old Isanusi (witch doctor) up in the Manica country 5 told me all about it. She said that the people who lived across those mountains were a branch of the Zulus, speaking a dialect of Zulu, but finer and bigger men even; that there lived among them great wizards, who had learnt their art from white men when ‘all the world was dark,’ and who had the secret of a wonderful mine of ”bright stones.“’
    “Well, I laughed at this story at the time, though it interested me, for the diamond fields were not discovered then, and poor Evans went off and got killed, and for twenty years I never thought any more of the matter. But just twenty years afterwards—and that is a long time, gentlemen, an elephant hunter does not often live for twenty years at his business—I heard something more definite about Suliman’s Mountains and the country which lies beyond it. I was up beyond the Manica country at a place called Sitanda’s Kraal, j and a miserable place it was, for one could get nothing to eat there, and there was but little game about. I had an attack of fever, and was in a bad way generally, when one day a Portugee arrived with a single companion—a half-breed. Now I know your Delagoa Portugee 6 well. There is no greater devil unhung in a general way, battening as he does upon human agony and flesh in the shape of slaves. But this was quite a different type of man to the low fellows I had been accustomed to meet; he reminded me more of the polite dons I have read about. He was tall and thin, with large dark eyes and curling grey moustachios. We talked together a little, for he could speak broken English, and I understood a little Portugee, and he told me that his name was José Silvestre, and that he had a place near Delagoa Bay; and when he went on next day with his half-breed companion, he said, ‘Good-bye,’ taking off his hat quite in the old style. ‘Good-bye, senor,’ he said; ‘if ever we meet again I shall be the richest man in the world, and I will remember you.’ I laughed a little—I was too weak to laugh much—and watched him strike out for the great desert to the west, wondering if he was mad, or what he thought he was going to find there.
    “A week passed, and I got the better of my fever. One evening I was sitting on the ground in front of the little tent I had with me, chewing the last leg of a miserable fowl I had bought from a native for a bit of cloth worth twenty fowls, and staring at the hot red sun sinking down into the desert, when suddenly I saw a figure, apparently that of a European, for it wore a coat, on the slope of the rising ground opposite to me, about three hundred yards away. The figure crept along on its hands and knees, then it got up and staggered along a few yards on its legs, only to fall and crawl along again. Seeing that it must be somebody in distress, I sent one of my hunters to help him, and presently he arrived, and who do you suppose it turned out to be?”
    “José Silvestre, of course,” said Captain Good. “Yes, José Silvestre, or rather his skeleton and a little skin. His face was bright yellow with bilious fever, and his large, dark eyes stood nearly out of his head, for all his flesh had gone. There was nothing but yellow parchment-like skin, white hair, and the gaunt bones sticking up beneath.
    “ ‘Water! for the sake of Christ, water!’ he moaned. I saw that his lips were cracked, and his tongue, which protruded between them, swollen and