Jess

Jess, by H. Rider Haggard

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Title: Jess
Author: H. Rider Haggard
Release Date: April 22, 2006 [EBook #5898]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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Produced by John Bickers; Dagny

JESS
By H. Rider Haggard
First Published 1887.

TO MY WIFE

JESS
CHAPTER I
JOHN HAS AN ADVENTURE
The day had been very hot even for the Transvaal, where the days still
know how to be hot in the autumn, although the neck of the summer is
broken--especially when the thunderstorms hold off for a week or two,
as they do occasionally. Even the succulent blue lilies--a variety of the
agapanthus which is so familiar to us in English greenhouses--hung
their long trumpet-shaped flowers and looked oppressed and miserable,
beneath the burning breath of the hot wind which had been blowing for
hours like the draught from a volcano. The grass, too, near the wide
roadway that stretched in a feeble and indeterminate fashion across the
veldt, forking, branching, and reuniting like the veins on a lady's arm,
was completely coated over with a thick layer of red dust. But the hot
wind was going down now, as it always does towards sunset. Indeed,
all that remained of it were a few strictly local and miniature
whirlwinds, which would suddenly spring up on the road itself, and
twist and twirl fiercely round, raising a mighty column of dust fifty feet
or more into the air, where it hung long after the wind had passed, and
then slowly dissolved as its particles floated to the earth.
Advancing along the road, in the immediate track of one of these
desultory and inexplicable whirlwinds, was a man on horseback. The
man looked limp and dirty, and the horse limper and dirtier. The hot
wind had "taken all the bones out of them," as the Kafirs say, which
was not very much to be wondered at, seeing that they had been
journeying through it for the last four hours without off-saddling.
Suddenly the whirlwind, which had been travelling along smartly,
halted, and the dust, after revolving a few times in the air like a dying
top, slowly began to disperse in the accustomed fashion. The man on
the horse halted also, and contemplated it in an absent kind of way.
"It's just like a man's life," he said aloud to his horse, "coming from

nobody knows where, nobody knows why, and making a little column
of dust on the world's highway, then passing away, leaving the dust to
fall to the ground again, to be trodden under foot and forgotten."
The speaker, a stout, well set-up, rather ugly man, apparently on the
wrong side of thirty, with pleasant blue eyes and a reddish peaked
beard, laughed a little at his own sententious reflection, and then gave
his jaded horse a tap with the sjambock in his hand.
"Come on, Blesbok," he said, "or we shall never get to old Croft's place
to-night. By Jove! I believe that must be the turn," and he pointed with
his whip to a little rutty track that branched from the Wakkerstroom
main road and stretched away towards a curious isolated hill with a
large flat top, which rose out of the rolling plain some four miles to the
right. "The old Boer said the second turn," he went on still talking to
himself, "but perhaps he lied. I am told that some of them think it is a
good joke to send an Englishman a few miles wrong. Let's see, they
told me the place was under the lee of a table-topped hill, about half an
hour's ride from the main road, and that is a table-topped hill, so I think
I will try it. Come on, Blesbok," and he put the tired nag into a sort of
"tripple," or ambling canter much affected by South African horses.
"Life is a queer thing," reflected Captain John Niel to himself as he
cantered along slowly. "Now here am I, at the age of thirty-four, about
to begin the world again as assistant to an old Transvaal farmer. It is a
pretty end to all one's ambitions, and to fourteen years' work in the
army; but it is what it has come to, my boy, so you had better make the
best of it."
Just then his cogitations were interrupted, for on the farther side of a
gentle slope suddenly there appeared an extraordinary sight. Over