Allan and the Ice Gods

Had I the slightest qualification for the task, I, Allan Quatermain,
would like to write an essay on Temptation.

This, of course, comes to all, in one shape or another, or at any rate
to most, for there are some people so colourless, so invertebrate that
they cannot be tempted--or perhaps the subtle powers which surround
and direct, or misdirect, us do not think them worth an effort. These
cling to any conditions, moral or material, in which they may find
themselves, like limpets to a rock; or perhaps float along the stream
of circumstance like jellyfish, making no effort to find a path for
themselves in either case, and therefore die as they have lived--quite
good because nothing has ever moved them to be otherwise--the objects
of the approbation of the world, and, let us hope, of Heaven also.

The majority are not so fortunate; something is always egging their
living personalities along this or that road of mischief. Materialists
will explain to us that this something is but the passions inherited
from a thousand generations of unknown progenitors who, departing,
left the curse of their blood behind them. I, who am but a simple old
fellow, take another view, which, at any rate, is hallowed by many
centuries of human opinion. Yes, in this matter, as in sundry others,
I put aside all the modern talk and theories and am plumb for the
good, old-fashioned, and most efficient Devil as the author of our
woes. No one else could suit the lure so exactly to the appetite as
that old fisherman in the waters of the human soul, who knows so well
how to bait his hooks and change his flies so that they may be
attractive not only to all fish but to every mood of each of them.

Well, without going further with the argument, rightly or wrongly,
that is my opinion.

Thus, to take a very minor matter--for if the reader thinks that these
words are the prelude to telling a tale of murder or other great sins
he is mistaken--I believe that it was Satan himself, or, at any rate,
one of his agents, who caused my late friend, Lady Ragnall, to
bequeath to me the casket of the magical herb called /Taduki/, in
connection with which already we had shared certain remarkable
adventures.[*]

[*] See the books /The Ivory Child/ and /The Ancient Allan/.

Now, it may be argued that to make use of this /Taduki/ and on its
wings to be transported, in fact or in imagination, to some far-away
state in which one appears for a while to live and move and have one's
being is no crime, however rash the proceeding. Nor is it, since, if
we can find new roads to knowledge, or even to interesting imaginings,
why should we not take them? But to break one's word /is/ a crime, and
because of the temptation of this stuff, which, I confess, for me has
more allurement than anything else on earth, at any rate, in these
latter days, I have broken my word.

For, after a certain experience at Ragnall Castle, did I not swear to
myself and before Heaven that no power in the world, not even that of
Lady Ragnall herself, would induce me again to inhale those time-
dissolving fumes and look upon that which, perhaps designedly, is
hidden from the eyes of man; namely, revealments of his buried past,
or mayhap of his yet unacted future? What do I say? This business is
one of dreams--no more; though I think that those dreams are best left
unexplored, because they suggest too much and yet leave the soul
unsatisfied. Better the ignorance in which we are doomed to wander
than these liftings of corners of the veil; than these revelations
which excite delirious hopes that, after all, may be but marsh lights
which, when they vanish, will leave us in completer blackness.