Excerpt from the book...The story which is narrated in the following pages came to me from thelips of my old friend Allan Quatermain, or Hunter Quatermain, as we usedto call him in South Africa. He told it to me one evening when I wasstopping with him at the place he bought in Yorkshire. Shortly afterthat, the death of his only son so unsettled him that he immediatelyleft England, accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers,Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into thedark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of which hehas heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in thevast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find thembefore he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companionshave departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return. One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from amission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about threehundred miles north of Zanzibar. In it he says that they have gonethrough many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and havefound traces which go far towards making him hope that the results oftheir wild quest may be a "magnificent and unexampled discovery." Igreatly fear, however, that all he has discovered is death; for thisletter came a long while ago, and nobody has heard a single word of theparty since. They have totally vanished.