Long Odds

The story told in the following pages came to me from the mouth of my old friend Allan Quatermaine, or Hunter Quatermein, as we call him in South Africa. He told me this one night while I was staying with him at a place he bought in Yorkshire. Soon after, the death of his only son had made him so uneasy that he immediately left England, accompanied by his two friends, his former wandering companions Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Hood, and was now completely lost into the dark heart of Africa. He becomes convinced that the white people he has heard rumors about throughout his life exist somewhere in the highlands, in a huge, as yet unexplored interior, and his greatest passion is to find them to death. This is the wild quest in which he and his friends broke up and I suspect they will never return. I received only one letter from an old gentleman, about three hundred miles north of Zanzibar, from a missionary station above Tanya, a river on the east coast. In it, he says, they've experienced many challenges and adventures, but they're alive and well, and they've found traces that go so far as to make him hope that the results of his wild searches could be a "remarkable and incomprehensible discovery." However, I am terrified that the only thing he discovers is death; for this letter came a long time ago, and since then no one has heard a word of the party. They disappeared completely.

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