Heu-Heu, or The Monster by H. Rider Haggard Garden City New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1924 COPYRIGHT, 1923, 1924, BY H. RIDER HAGGARD ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. First Edition CONTENTS CHAPTER I. THE STORM CHAPTER II. THE PICTURE IN THE CAVE CHAPTER III. THE OPENER-OF-ROADS CHAPTER IV. THE LEGEND OF HEU-HEU CHAPTER V. ALLAN MAKES A PROMISE CHAPTER VI. THE BLACK RIVER CHAPTER VII. THE WALLOO CHAPTER VIII. THE HOLY ISLE CHAPTER IX. THE FEAST CHAPTER X. THE SACRIFICE CHAPTER XI. THE SLUICE GATE CHAPTER XII. THE PLOT CHAPTER XIII. THE TERRIBLE NIGHT CHAPTER XIV. THE END OF HEU-HEU CHAPTER XV. SABEELA’S FAREWELL CHAPTER XVI. RACE FOR LIFE AUTHOR’S NOTE The author wishes to state that this tale was written in its present form some time before the discovery in Rhodesia of the fossilized and immeasurably ancient remains of the proto-human person who might well have been one of the Heuheua, the “Hairy Wood-Folk,” of which it tells through the mouth of Allan Quatermain. Heu-Heu, or the Monster CHAPTER I. THE STORM Now I, the Editor, whose duty it has been as an executor or otherwise, to give to the world so many histories of, or connected with, the adventures of my dear friend, the late Allan Quatermain, or Macumazahn, Watcher-by-Night, as the natives in Africa used to call him, come to one of the most curious of them all. Here I should say at once that he told it to me many years ago at his house called “The Grange,” in Yorkshire, where I was staying, but a little while before he departed with Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good upon his last expedition into the heart of Africa, whence he returned no more. At the time I made very copious notes of a history that struck me as strange and suggestive, but the fact is that afterwards I lost them and could never trust my memory to reproduce even their substance with the accuracy which I knew my departed friend would have desired. Only the other day, however, in turning out a box-room, I came upon a hand-bag which I recognized as one that I had used in the far past when I was practising, or trying to practise, at the Bar. With a certain emotion such as overtakes us when, after the lapse of many years, we are confronted by articles connected with the long-dead events of our youth, I took it to a window and with some difficulty opened its rusted catch. In the bag was a small collection of rubbish: papers connected with cases on which once I had worked as “devil” for an eminent and learned friend who afterwards became a judge, a blue pencil with a broken point, and so forth.