The Ancient Allan

The Ancient Allan

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Title: The Ancient Allan
Author: H. Rider Haggard
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THE ANCIENT ALLAN By H. Rider Haggard
First Published 1920.

THE ANCIENT ALLAN
BY
H. RIDER HAGGARD

THE ANCIENT ALLAN


CHAPTER I
AN OLD FRIEND
Now I, Allan Quatermain, come to the weirdest (with one or two
exceptions perhaps) of all the experiences which it has amused me to
employ my idle hours in recording here in a strange land, for after all
England is strange to me. I grow elderly. I have, as I suppose, passed
the period of enterprise and adventure and I should be well satisfied
with the lot that Fate has given to my unworthy self.
To begin with, I am still alive and in health when by all the rules I
should have been dead many times over. I suppose I ought to be

thankful for that but, before expressing an opinion on the point, I
should have to be quite sure whether it is better to be alive or dead. The
religious plump for the latter, though I have never observed that the
religious are more eager to die than the rest of us poor mortals.
For instance, if they are told that their holy hearts are wrong, they
spend time and much money in rushing to a place called Nauheim in
Germany, to put them right by means of water-drinking, thereby
shortening their hours of heavenly bliss and depriving their heirs of a
certain amount of cash. The same thing applies to Buxton in my own
neighbourhood and gout, especially when it threatens the stomach or
the throat. Even archbishops will do these things, to say nothing of such
small fry as deans, or stout and prominent lay figures of the Church.
From common sinners like myself such conduct might be expected, but
in the case of those who are obviously poised on the topmost rungs of
the Jacobean--I mean, the heavenly--ladder, it is legitimate to inquire
why they show such reluctance in jumping off. As a matter of fact the
only persons that, individually, I have seen quite willing to die, except
now and again to save somebody else whom they were so foolish as to
care for more than they did for themselves, have been not those "upon
whom the light has shined" to quote an earnest paper I chanced to read
this morning, but, to quote again, "the sinful heathen wandering in their
native blackness," by which I understand the writer to refer to their
moral state and not to their sable skins wherein for the most part they
are also condemned to wander, that is if they happen to have been born
south of a certain degree of latitude.
To come to facts, the staff of Faith which each must shape for himself,
is often hewn from unsuitable kinds of wood, yes, even by the very best
among us. Willow, for instance, is pretty and easy to cut, but try to
support yourself with it on the edge of a precipice and see where you
are. Then of a truth you will long for ironbark, or even homely oak. I
might carry my parable further, some allusions to the proper material of
which to fashion the helmet of Salvation suggest themselves to me for
example, but I won't.
The truth is that we fear to die because all the religions are full of

uncomfortable hints as to what may happen to us afterwards as a
reward for our