Haikus from The Ancient Allan by H. Rider Haggard

From a book categorized as Fiction / Action & Adventure and 288 pages follows a description and a number of hidden haikus found in the book:

 

Now I, Allan Quatermain, come to the weirdest (with one or two exceptions perhaps) of all the experiences which it has amused me to employ my idle hours in recording here in a strange land, for after all England is strange to me. I grow elderly. I have, as I suppose, passed the period of enterprise and adventure and I should be well satisfied with the lot that Fate has given to my unworthy self.

To begin with, I am still alive and in health when by all the rules I should have been dead many times over. I suppose I ought to be thankful for that but, before expressing an opinion on the point, I should have to be quite sure whether it is better to be alive or dead. The religious plump for the latter, though I have never observed that the religious are more eager to die than the rest of us poor mortals.

For instance, if they are told that their holy hearts are wrong, they spend time and much money in rushing to a place called Nauheim in Germany, to put them right by means of water-drinking, thereby shortening their hours of heavenly bliss and depriving their heirs of a certain amount of cash. The same thing applies to Buxton in my own neighbourhood and gout, especially when it threatens the stomach or the throat. Even archbishops will do these things, to say nothing of such small fry as deans, or stout and prominent lay figures of the Church....

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Immediately
 behind the chariot walked
several great nobles.

For this man of blood
 was destined to die in blood,
though not by murder.

Then they shut again
 and through them burst a whine like
that of a hurt dog.

“By the holy Fire,”
 laughed the King, “I feel my heart
melting already.

Not once only since
 the sun rose has my mind been
empty as a drum.

They were great men, black
 as charcoal with thick lips, white
teeth and flat noses.

The real rout began.
 The Immortals were broken
like an earthen jar.