Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 January 1889 — KING SOLOMON’S MINES. [ARTICLE]

KING SOLOMON’S MINES.

BY H. RIDER HAGGARD.

CHAPTER VI Continued. IN THE CAVE. We rushed up to him, and there, sure enough, in a deep cut or indentation on the veiy top of the sand koppie was an undoubted pool of wateT. How it came to be in such a strange place we did not atop to enquire, nor did we hesitate •tits black and uninviting appearance. It was water, «»r a good imitati n Of it, and that was enough for us. We gave a bound and a rush and in another moment were all down on our stomachs sucking up the uninviting fluid as though it were nectar fit for the gods. Heavens, how *We did drinkJ Then when we hai done drinking we tore off our clothes and sat down in it, absorbing the moisture through our parched skins. You, my reader, who have only to tarn on a couple of taps and summon ‘ hot” and “cold” from an unseen vasty boiler, can have little idea of the luxury of that mtfddy wallow in that brackish tepid water. < '• After awhile we arose from it refreshed indeed, and fell to on our “biltong,” of which we had scarcely been able to' touch a mouthful for twenty-four ho„urs and lay down by the side of that blessed pool under the overnanging shadow of toe bank, and slept till midday. All that day we rested there by the water, thanking onr stars that we had been lucky enough to find it; bad as it was, and not forgetting'to render a due share of gratitude to 1 he ahade of the long departed De Silvertra, who bad corked it down so accurately on the tail of his shirt. The wonderful thing to us was that it shonld have lasted so long, and the only way that I can account for it is by the supposition that it is fed by some spring deep do »n in the sand. Having filled both ourselves and our water-bottles as full as possible, in far better spirits we started off again with the moon. That night we covered nearly flve-and-twenty miles, but, needless to say, found no more water,though we were lucky enough on the following day to get s little shade behind some ant-heaps. When the sun rose, and, for awhile, cleared away the mysterious mists, Sn liman’s Berg and toe two majestic breasts, now only about twenty miles off, seemed to be towering right above ns, and W>ked grander than ever. At toe approach of evening are started on again, and, to cat a long story short, by daylight next morning found ourselves upon the lowest slopes of Sheba’s left breast, for which we had been steadily steering. By this time our ws*er was again exhausted and we were suffering severely from thirst; nor indeed could we see any chance of re lieving it till * e reached the snow line far, far above ns. After resting an hour or two, driven to it by our torturing thirst, we went on again, toiling painfully ir the* burning heat up the lava Slopes, we found that the huge base of the mountain was compose of lava beds belched ont in some far past age. By eleven o’clock we were utterly exhausted, and were, generally speaking, in a very bad way, indeed. The lava clinker, over which we had made our way, though comparatively smooth compared with some clinker I have heard of, such as ou the Island of Ascension for instance, was yet rough enough to make our feet very tore, and this, together with onr onr other mis cries, had pretty well finished us. A few hundred yards above ns were some large lumps of lava and toward these we made with the intention of lying down beneath the shade. We reached them, and to our surprise, so far as we have a capacity for surprise left in us. on a little plateau or ridge close by we saw toe lava covered with a dense green growth. Evidently soil formed from decomposed lava'had rested there and in due course had become the receptacle of seedß deposited by birds But we did not take muen further interest in the green growth, so one cannot live,on grass like-'Nebuchadnezzar. That requ<res a special dispens tion of Providence and peculiar digestive organs. So we sat down under the rocks and groaned and J for one heartily wished that we had never started on this fool’s errand. As we were sitting there 1 saw Umpoha get up and bobble off toward the patch of green, and a few minutes afterward, to my great astonishment. 1 perc ived that usually uncommonly dignified individual dancing and shouting like a maniac, and waving something green. Off we all scrambled toward him as fast as our wearied limbs would carry us, hoping that he had found water. “What is it, son of a fool?” I shouted in Zulu. “It is food ard water, Macumazahn,’ and again he waved the green thing. Then I saw what he had got. It was a melon. We had hit upon a patch of wild melons, thousands of them, and dead ripe. “Melons!” I yelled to Good, he was next to me; and in another second he had his false teeth fixed in one. I think we eat about six each before we had done, and, poor fruit as they were, I doubt if I thought anything JBsr. But melons are not very satisfying, and when we had satisfied our thirst with their pulpy substance, and Bet a stock tc cool by the simple process of’ r cutting them in two and setting them on end in toe hot son to get cold by evaporation, we began to feel exceedingly hungry. We had still some biltong left, but our stomachs turned from biltong, and besides we had to be very eparirfg of it, for we could not say when we should get more food. At this moment a lucky thing happened. Looking toward the desert I saw a flock of about ten laige birds flying straight toward us “Skit, Bass, skit!” (shoot, master, shoot), whispered the Hottentot, throwing fcimeelf on his face, an example which we all followed. Then 1 saw that the birds were a flock of pauw (bustards), and Ibat they would pass within fifty of my head. Taking one of the repeating Winchester* 1 waited till they were nearly over ns, and then jnmped to my feet. 'On seeing me the pauw bunched up together, as I expected they would, and I fired two shots straight into th - thick of them, and as, luck would have it, brought one down, a flue fellow, weighing about twenty pounds. In half an hoar we had a fire made of dry melon stalks, and he toastii g over it and we had such a feed as «e had not for a ewek. We eat that panw; nothing was left of him but his hones and his beak, and felt not a little better afterward. That night we again went on with the

moon, carrving a» many melons as we couldiWith us. As We got higher up we found the air get cooler and cooler, which was a great relief to us, and at dawn, so tar as we could judge, w re not more thau about a dozen miles from the snow line. Here we found more melons, so. had no longer any .anxiety about water, for we, knew that we should get plenty of snow. But the ascent had t uow become very precipitous, and we made but slow pro-, gross, not more than g mile an hoqr Also that night we eat our last morsel of biltong. As yet, with the exception of the pauw, we had seen no living thing on the mountain, nor had we come across a single spring or stream of water, wb'Ch struck os as very odd, considering all the snow above ns, which must, we thought, melt sometimes. But as we af'erward discovered, owing to some emae, which it is quite beyond ray powef to explain, all the streams flowed down the. north side of the monntaina We had now began to grow very anxions about food. We had escaped death by thirst, but it seemed probable that it was only to die of hunger. The events of the next three miserable days are best deserbed by copying the entries made at the time in my note book. 21st May.—Started 11 a. m-, finding the atmosphere quite cold enough to travel by day, carrying s me water melons with us. Struggled on all day, but saw no more melons, having, evidently, passed out of their district. Saw no game of any sort. Halt-d for the night at sundown, had no food for many hours. Suffered much during the night from cold. 22d —Started at sunrise again, feeling very faint and weak. Only made five mil<.s all. day; found some patches of snow of which we eat.bu* nothing else. Camped at night under the edge of a platne. Cold bitter. Drank a little brandy each, and huddled ourselves together, each wnroped up in our blanket to' keep ourselves alive. Are now suffering frightfully from starvation and weariness. Thought that Ventvogel would have died during the night. 23d— Struggled forward as soon as the snn was well up-, and had thawed our limbs a little. We are now in a dreadiul plight, and I fear that unless we get food this will be onr last day’s journey. Rut little brandy left. Good, Sir Henry and Umbopa bear np wonderful, but Ventvogel is in a very bad way. Like most Hottentots, he cannot stand cold. Fangs of hnnger not so had, but have a sort of numb feeling about the stomach. Others say the same. We are now on a level with the percipitous chain or wall of lava, connecting the two breasts, and the view is glorious. Behind us the great glowing desert rolls away to the horizon, and before us lies mile upon mile of smooth hard snow almost levels hut swelling gently upward, out of the center of which the nipple of the mountain, which appears to be some miles in circumference, rises about four thousand feet into the sky. Not a living thing is to be seen. God help us, I fear our time has come.

And now I will drop the journal, partly because it is not very interesting reading&and partly because what fol lows requires perhaps rather more accurate telling. All that day (the 23d May) we struggled slowly on up the incline of know, lying down from time to time to rest. A trange, gaunt crew we must have looked, as, laden as we were, we dragged our weary feet over the dazzling plain, glaring round us with hungry eyes. Not that there was much use in glaring, for there was nothing to eat. We did not do more than seven miles that day. Just before Bunset we found ourselves right under the nipple of Sheba’s left breast, which towered up thousands * f feet into the air above us, a vast, smooth hillock of frozen snow. Bad as we felt we could not but appreciate the wonderful scene, made even more wonderfnl by the flying rays of light from the setting sun, which here and there stained the snow blood-red, and crowned the towering mass above us with a diadem of glory. “I say,” gasped Good, presently, “we ought to be somewhere near the cave the old gentleman wrote about.” “Yes ” said I, “if there is a cave.” “Come Quaterman,” groaned Sir Henry, “don’t talk like that; I have every fait,h in the Don; remember the water. We shall find the place soon.”

“If we don’t find itjgefore dark we are dead ram, that is all ato»ut it,” was my consolatory reply. , For the next ten minutes we trudged on in silence, when suddenly Umbopa, who was marching along beside me wrapped up in his blanket, and with a leather belt strapped so tight round his stomach to “make his hunger small,” as he said, that his waist looked like a girl’s, caught me by the arm. “Look!” he said, pointing toward the Springing slope of the nipple. 1 followed his glance, and preceived some twO| hundred yards from us what appeared to be a hole in the snow. “It is the cave.” said Umbopa. We m de the best of our way to the spot, and found sure enough that the hole was the mouth of a cave, no doubt the same as that of which Da»Bilvestra i, wrote. We were none to soon,- for just as we reached the shelter theshn went down with startling rapidity, leaving the whole place nearly dark- In these latitudes there is . but little twilight. We crept into the caVe, which did not appear to be very oig, aud huddling ourselves together for warmth, swallowed what reclaim'd of our brandy bareiy a mouthful each—and tried to forget our mi&er ies in sleep. But this the cold was too intense to allow ns to do. I am convinced that at that groat altitude the thermometer can not have been less than fourteen or fifteen degrees below fre* zing point. Whatthis meant to us, enervated as we were by hardship, waut of fq< d, and the great heat >*f the desert my reader can imagine better than I d scribe. Suffice it.to say that it waa something as near death from exposure as I have ever felt „ There we sat hoqr alter hour through the bitter night feeling the frost wader round and nip ns now in the finger, nowin the foot.amt now in the face. In vaindtd we huddle up closer and closer; there 'liras no warmth in our miserable carcasses. Sometimes one of us would drop into an uneasy slumber fora few minutes, but we could o*i4 sleep long, and perhaps it was fortunate, for t dhubt it we shonld ever have woke again. I beiieve it Was qply by force of witl that we kept onr selves alive at all. Not very Jong before dawn I heard ibe Hottentot Ventvogel, whose teeth had been chattering all night like castanets, give a deer and then, his teeth stopped

chattering.; I did not think anything of it at the time, concluding that he had gone to sleep. His back re-ting again*-1 mine, and it seemed to grow colder and colder, till at !a-t it was like ice. ; . At length the air began to grow gray With -light, then 1 swift golden arrow, came flashipf; across the snow, and at last the glorious sup peeped up above the lava wall and looked in upon our ha f frozen fornis and upon Ventvogel. siting there amongst ns stone dead. No wonder his back had felt cold, poor fellow. He bad died when I beaid him sigh, an<l was now altnosW frozen stiff. Shocked beyond measure we dragged ou rßel ves from the corpse (strange the horror we ail have, of,the companionship of a dead body), and left it still sitting there, with its armß clasped - about its knees. By this time the sunlight was pouring its cold rays (for here they were cold) straight in at the mouth of the cave. Suddenly I heard an exclamation of fear from some one, and turned my head down the cave. And this was what I saw. Sitting at the end, for it was not more than twenty feet long, was another form, of which the head rested on the chest and the long arms hung down. -1 stared at it, ►nd saw that it too was a dead man, and more a white man. The others saw it too, and the sight proved too much for our shattered nerves. One and all we scrambled out of the cave as fast as our half frozen limbs would allow.

CHAPTER VII. 89LOMOn’S ROAD. Outside the cave we halted, feeling rather foolish. “1 am going track,” said Sir Henry, “Why?” asked Good. “Because it has st uck me that—what we saw may be my brother,” This was a new idea,and wr re-entered the cave to put it to the proof. After the bright light outside our eyes, weak as they were with staring at the snow, could not for awhile pierce the gloom of the cave. Presently, however, we grew accustomed to the semi-darkness, and advanced on the dead form. Sir Henry knelt down and peered into its face. ! “Thank God,” he Baid, with a sigh of relief, “it is not my brother.” Then I went and looked. The corpse was that of a tall man in middle life with aquiline features, grizzled hair, and a lon* black mustache. The skin was perfectly yellow, and sketched tightly over the bone-*. Its clothing, with the exception of what seemed to be the remains of a pair of woolen hose, had been removed,leaving the skeleton-like frame naked; Round the neck hung a yellow ivory crucifix. The corpse was frozen perfectly stiff. “ Who on the earth can it be?” said I. “Can’t you guess” asked Good. I shook my head. * “Why, theold Don, Jose da Silvertra, of course—who else?”

“Impossible,” I gasped, “hediedthree hundred years ago.” “And what is there to prevent his lasting for three thousand years in this atmosphere I should like to know?”asked Good. “If only the air is cold enough, flesh and blood will keep as fresh as New Zealand mutton forever, and Heaven knows it is cold enough here. The sun never gets in here; no -animal comes here to tear or destroy. No doubt his slave,’of whom he speaks on the map, took off his clothes and left him. He could not have buried him alone. Look here,” he went on, stoop -ing down and picking up a queer-shaped bone scraped at the end into a Bharp point, “here is the ‘cleft-bone’ that he used to draw the map with.” gazed astonished for a moment, forgetting our own miseries in this extraordinary and, as it seemed to us, semi-miraculous sight. “Ay,” said Sir H- nry, “and here is where he got his ink from,” and he pointed to a small wound on the dead man’s hft arm. “Did ever man see such a thing before?” There was no longer any doubt about the matter, which I confess for my own part perfectly appalled me. There he sat, the dead man whose directions, written some ten generations ago, had led us to this spot. There in my own hand was the rode pen with which he had written them, and there round his neck was the crucifix his dying lips had kissed. Gazing at him my imagination could reconstru t the whole scene, the traveler dying of cold and starvation,and yet striviug to convey the great secret he had discovered to the world —the awful loadings of his death, of which the evidence sat before us. It even seemed to me that I could trace in his strongly marked features a likeness to those of my poor friend Nilvestre, nis descendant, who had dnd twenty years ago in n»v arras, but perhaps that was fancy. At any rate there he sa\ a sad memento of the fate that so often overtakes those who would penetrate into the unknown; and there probably he will still sit, crowned with the dread majesty of death, for centuries yet unborn,to startle the eyes of wanderers like ourselves, if any such should ever come to invade his loneliness. The thing overpowered us, already nearly done to death as we were with*cold and hnnger “Let us go r ” said Sir Henry in a low voice, wil give him a companion, and lifting up the dead body of the Hottentot Ventvogel, he placed it near that of the old Don. Then he stooped down, and with a jerk broke the rotten string ofrthe crucifix round his neck, for his fingers were too cold to attempt to unfasten it. I believe that he still has it I took the pen, and it is before me as I write—sometimes I sign my name with it

Then leaving those two, 'the prend white man of a past age, and the poor Hottentot to keep their eternal vigil in the midst of the eternal snows, we crept out of the cave into the welcome sunshine and resumed our path, wondering in our hearts h w many hours it would be before we were even as they are. _ c >nt* neiD^twei. r .-: Mr Evarts Mattes a speech. The other day a friend told me what he claimed to be anhkr story about Mr. Evarts. I had never, heard it before, but new stories about Mr. Evarts are rare and at a high premium. A gentleman. he said, was entering the Senate gallery at Washington when hb chanced t,o meet a friend coming out.

“Hello!” he said, “what’a going on?” “Rothing just now. Mr. Evarta haa, been andr* aging the t^enate.” “Haa be? I’m aorrv I missed that” “Yes. it was a great treat. He spoke for more tbanfour hoars.” “What about?” “Ha didn’t say.”