Reading my new Kindle stuff...
What gun does Allan Quatermain shoot?
Why an 8 bore double, of course. It took 3 shots with it to take down a Rhino. One was a botch miss by another party member.
He also totes along others, of course. Every white hunter in the party has at least one long gun. Something big and often a level action repeater of Winchester persuasion. A revolver, too. He mentions a .500 Nitro Express (this may be the 8-bore... I dunno... I doubt it because the .500 shoots a 450ish gr projectile and an 8-bore should be an eight of a point... mid 800 grain weight), there is a 4-bore (!) for a party member larger than him as Quatermain only weighs 140 pounds or so, and a bunch of Martinis. For funsies, I guess.
For dramatic effect, he likes to load all the ammo in one package, so when a donkey or hapless porter is swept away in a river torrent he has only the ammo on him, making for more drama in the story. 700 miles from the coast in the middle of Deepest Darkest, and only the ammo on him in his pockets.
If you are a porter, be sure that Allan knows your name. If you are referred to as "one of the bearers from Such-n-such tribe," you might as well be Ensign Rickie in the Federation red uniform blouse going with the away team down to the strange planet's surface with Kirk, Bones, and Spock. You are not going to see how Quatermain's story ends. Or anything else for that matter.
I prefer it when the story doesn't diverge to the fantastical. Taking on a bunch of Masai in a krall is one thing, but shooting down an underground river for miles to emerge in a hidden lake with giant crabs and a lost tribe of white natives is a bit of a stretch.
[And I saw a commercial for the Kindle Fire on TV for the first time last night. Neat. I'm glad I got the e-ink kind, instead, tho.]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Have you tried the text to voice feature? Works pretty good in the car!
A) Well, when H.Rider was writing about Quartermain, Africa was pretty much a Different Planet to most of his readers. And Fantastagorical writing was a Hallmark of the 19th. Century.
Got Carol the Fire for Christmas. Hard to do a Compare and Contrast with my basic model, since it doesn't seem to leave her side!
8-bore is 0.835 cal. But gunsmiths were rather "loose" in the specs for one-off custom guns back then.
http://ambivalentskeptic.wordpress.com/
Point of order: It's "Quatermain", not "Quatermain".
And he also killed off several named black flunkies and both of his wives over the years. Quatermain's stories seldom ended happily for anyone, himself included.
The bizarre fantastic inclusions are precisely the parts I like the best!
Post a Comment