Adventure stories; Africa -- Fiction; Hunting guides -- Fiction; Quatermain, Allan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
I awoke to find myself lying on a comfortable bed in a hut built and
fashioned on the same model as the centre one. While I was wondering
what time it was, a native came bringing some clean clothes on his arm,
and, luxury of luxuries, produced a bath hollowed from wood. I rose,
feeling a very different man, my strength had come back again to me; I
dressed, and following a covered passage found myself in the centre
hut. Here the table was set for breakfast with all manner of good
things, such as I had not seen for many a month, which I contemplated
with healthy satisfaction. Presently I looked up, and there before me
was a more delightful sight, for standing in one of the doorways which
led to the sleeping huts was Stella, leading little Tota by the hand.
She was very simply dressed in a loose blue gown, with a wide collar,
and girdled in at the waist by a little leather belt. In the bosom of
her robe was a bunch of orange blooms, and her rippling hair was tied
in a single knot behind her shapely head. She greeted me with a smile,
asking how I had slept, and then held Tota up for me to kiss. Under her
loving care the child had been quite transformed. She was neatly
dressed in a garment of the same blue stuff that Stella wore, her fair
hair was brushed; indeed, had it not been for the sun blisters on her
face and hands, one would scarcely have believed that this was the same
child whom Indaba-zimbi and I had dragged for hour after hour through
the burning, waterless desert.
“We must breakfast alone, Mr. Allan,” she said; “my father is so upset
by your arrival that he will not get up yet. Oh, you cannot tell how
thankful I am that you have come. I have been so anxious about him of
late. He grows weaker and weaker; it seems to me as though the strength
were ebbing away from him. Now he scarcely leaves the kraal, I have to
manage everything about the farm; he does nothing but read and think.”
Just then Hendrika entered, bearing a jug of coffee in one hand and of
milk in the other, which she set down upon the table, casting a look of
little love at me as she did so.
“Be careful, Hendrika; you are spilling the coffee,” said Stella.
“Don’t you wonder how we come to have coffee here, Mr. Allan? I will
tell you—we grow it. That was my idea. Oh, I have lots of things to
show you. You don’t know what we have managed to do in the time that we
have been here. You see we have plenty of labour, for the people about
look upon my father as their chief.”
“Yes,” I said, “but how do you get all these luxuries of civilization?”
and I pointed to the books, the crockery, and the knives and forks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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