The Mystery of Cloomber : Original Text

I John Fothergill West, student of law in the University of St. Andrews, have endeavouredin the ensuing pages to lay my statement before the public in a concise and business-likefashion.It is not my wish to achieve literary success, nor have I any desire by the graces of mystyle, or by the artistic ordering of my incidents, to throw a deeper shadow over the strangepassages of which I shall have to speak.

My highest ambition is that those who knowsomething of the matter should, after reading my account, be able to conscientiouslyindorse it without finding a single paragraph in which I have either added to or detractedfrom the truth.Should I attain this result, I shall rest amply satisfied with the outcome of my first, andprobably my last, venture in literature.It was my intention to write out the sequence of events in due order, depending ontrustworthy hearsay when I was describing that which was beyond my own personalknowledge.

I have now, however, through the kind cooperation of friends, hit upon a planwhich promises to be less onerous to me and more satisfactory to the reader.

This isnothing less than to make use of the various manuscripts which I have by me bearing uponthe subject, and to add to them the first-hand evidence contributed by those who had thebest opportunities of knowing Major-General J.

B. Heatherstone.In pursuance of this design I shall lay before the public the testimony of Israel Stakes,formerly coachman at Cloomber Hall, and of John Easterling, F.R.C.P.

Edin., now practisingat Stranraer, in Wigtownshire. To these I shall add a verbatim account extracted from thejournal of the late John Berthier Heatherstone, of the events which occurred in the ThulValley in the autumn of '41 towards the end of the first Afghan War, with a description ofthe skirmish in the Terada defile, and of the death of the man Ghoolab Shah.To myself I reserve the duty of filling up all the gaps and chinks which may be left in thenarrative.

By this arrangement I have sunk from the position of an author to that of acompiler, but on the other hand my work has ceased to be a story and has expanded into aseries of affidavits.