| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: lips of my old friend Allan Quatermain, or Hunter Quatermain, as we used
to call him in South Africa. He told it to me one evening when I was
stopping with him at the place he bought in Yorkshire. Shortly after
that, the death of his only son so unsettled him that he immediately
left England, accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers,
Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into the
dark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of which he
has heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in the
vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find them
before he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companions
have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return.
Long Odds |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Finished by H. Rider Haggard: instead.
Next morning we left Nongoma early in the hope of reaching Ulundi
that evening if the Ivuna and Black Umfolozi Rivers proved
fordable. As it chanced, although they were high, we were able
to cross them, I seated on the horse which two of the Zulus led.
Next we tramped for miles through the terrible Bekameezi Valley,
a hot and desolate place which the Zulus swear is haunted. So
unhealthy is this valley, which is the home of large game, that
whole kraals full of people who have tried to cultivate the rich
land, have died in it of fever, or fled away leaving their crops
unreaped. Now no man dwells there. After this we climbed a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Cavalry General by Xenophon: [9] Cf. Plut. "Pelop." 34 (Clough, ii. p. 235): "And yet who would
compare all the victories in the Pythian and Olympian games put
together, with one of these enterprises of Pelopidas, of which he
successfully performed so many?"
[10] "To bind about the brows of states happiness as a coronal."
And this, too, is worth noting: that the buccaneer by sea, the
privateersman, through long practice in endurance, is able to live at
the expense of far superior powers. Yes, and the life of the
freebooter is no less natural and appropriate to landsmen--I do not
say, to those who can till and gather in the fruit of their fields,
but to those who find themselves deprived of sustenance; since there
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