Well, I had better come to the yoke.  It is a stiff place, and I feel as though I were bogged up to the axle.  But, “sutjes, sutjes,” as the Boers say—­I am sure I don’t know how they spell it—­softly does it.  A strong team will come through at last, that is, if they are not too poor.  You can never do anything with poor oxen.  Now to make a start.

I, Allan Quatermain, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman, make oath and say—­ That’s how I headed my deposition before the magistrate about poor Khiva’s and Ventvoegel’s sad deaths; but somehow it doesn’t seem quite the right way to begin a book.  And, besides, am I a gentleman?  What is a gentleman?  I don’t quite know, and yet I have had to do with niggers —­no, I will scratch out that word “niggers,” for I do not like it.  I’ve known natives who are, and so you will say, Harry, my boy, before you have done with this tale, and I have known mean whites with lots of money and fresh out from home, too, who are not.

At any rate, I was born a gentleman, though I have been nothing but a poor travelling trader and hunter all my life.  Whether I have remained so I known not, you must judge of that.  Heaven knows I’ve tried.  I have killed many men in my time, yet I have never slain wantonly or stained my hand in innocent blood, but only in self-defence.  The Almighty gave us our lives, and I suppose He meant us to defend them, at least I have always acted on that, and I hope it will not be brought up against me when my clock strikes.  There, there, it is a cruel and a wicked world, and for a timid man I have been mixed up in a great deal of fighting.  I cannot tell the rights of it, but at any rate I have never stolen, though once I cheated a Kafir out of a herd of cattle.  But then he had done me a dirty turn, and it has troubled me ever since into the bargain.

Well, it is eighteen months or so ago since first I met Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good.  It was in this way.  I had been up elephant hunting beyond Bamangwato, and had met with bad luck.  Everything went wrong that trip, and to top up with I got the fever badly.  So soon as I was well enough I trekked down to the Diamond Fields, sold such ivory as I had, together with my wagon and oxen, discharged my hunters, and took the post-cart to the Cape.  After spending a week in Cape Town, finding that they overcharged me at the hotel, and having seen everything there was to see, including the botanical gardens, which seem to me likely to confer a great benefit on the country, and the new Houses of Parliament, which I expect will do nothing of the sort, I determined to go back to Natal by the Dunkeld, then lying at the docks waiting for the Edinburgh Castle due in from England.  I took my berth and went aboard, and that afternoon the Natal passengers from the Edinburgh Castle transhipped, and we weighed and put to sea.