Rider Haggard - A Tale Of Three Lions @page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; } CHAPTER 1 THE INTEREST ON TEN SHILLINGS Most of you will have heard that Allan Quatermain, who was one of the party that discovered King Solomon’s mines some little time ago, and who afterwards came to live in England near his friend Sir Henry Curtis, went back to the wilderness again, as these old hunters almost invariably do, on one pretext or another.* [* This of course was written before Mr. Quatermain’s account of the adventures in the newly-discovered country of Zu-Vendis of himself, Sir Henry Curtis, and Capt. John Good had been received in England. —Editor. ] They cannot endure civilization for very long, its noise and racket and the omnipresence of broad-clothed humanity proving more trying to their nerves than the dangers of the desert. I think that they feel lonely here, for it is a fact that is too little understood, though it has often been stated, that there is no loneliness like the loneliness of crowds, especially to those who are unaccustomed to them.
