H. Rider Haggard

She

H. Rider Haggard published She in 1887. 130 years later, She is a memorable, if strange, read. It is a romantic action-adventure seen in a fun-house mirror; almost offensive at times to modern sensibilities, but still intriguing.

The two main characters are Leo Vincey and our narrator, his adoptive father L. Horace Holly. Holly describes himself as ugly — ape-like, with bandy legs, over-long arms and thick black hair that grows low on his forehead. He is a committed misanthrope and misogynist. Leo is a golden Apollo with a cap of blond curls. With Leo came a strange iron-bound chest, to be opened when Leo turns 25.

On Leo’s twenty-fifth birthday, they open the chest, to find a pot-shard inscribed in Greek and several translated documents. The shard and documents tell the story of an Egyptian princess, Amenartas, who fell in love with Kallikrates, a Greek priest sworn to Isis. The two fled to Africa, where they encountered a hidden kingdom ruled by a white queen. The queen also fell in love with Kallikrates, and killed him when he spurned her. Amenartas (who inscribed the shard) fled, and later bore a son, the start of the Vincey lineage.

Leo and Holly resolve to go to Africa to find the remains of this hidden kingdom. By now, Holly is in his mid-forties, Leo a strapping twenty-five-year-old. You’d think that Leo would take the lead in the adventure, but he doesn’t. When their ship founders in a storm off the African coast, Leo is promptly knocked out. It is Holly, their man Job and a crewman named Mohamed who row to safety in a smaller boat. As an action hero, and later as a romantic hero, Leo has many of the qualities of a golden retriever. He is pretty, energetic, sleeps a lot, is indiscriminately friendly and has a short attention span.

The party soon meets the Amahagger tribe, who worship a distant queen, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. The queen has commanded them to bring any white men to her. The tribe, or clan, does not look African — some, Holly says, look Asian — and Holly tells us their women are equal to their men. They are matrilineal, and women choose their own mates or husbands. A strapping girl with chestnut hair named Ustane promptly claims Leo, and Leo does not object.

Holly becomes friends with Ballili, an Amahagger elder, who explains the whole “our women are equal” idea in more detail:

‘We worship them,’ he went on, ‘up to a certain point, till at last they get unbearable, which’ he added, ‘they do, about every second generation.’
‘And then what do you do?’ I asked with curiosity.
‘Then,’ he answered, with a faint smile, ‘We rise, and kill the old ones as an example to the young ones, and to show them that we are the strongest.’

Job refuses one of the women’s advances, with bad results for Mohamed, the lone black African in the story. Holly and Leo go to the aid of their comrade. In the melee, Ustane saves Leo’s life. Ballili arrives to break things up and take the travelers to meet She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.

The enigmatic queen lives in a honeycomb of caverns, the crypts of the fabled city of Kor. En route, Leo, wounded in the fight, succumbs to a fever and spends much of this portion of the book unconscious, with Ustane at his side. It is Holly who is first introduced to “She,” it is Holly who first sees her unearthly beauty, and it is Holly who first hears her story.

She — or Ayesha, as she prefers — is a stunningly beautiful white woman who looks no older than thirty; yet she learned the secret of longevity and has lived more than two thousand years if her tale is to be believed. She fell in love with Kallikrates, and has waited in these caves until he is reincarnated. Leo is that reincarnation.

Ayesha is imperious and cruel, sentencing the cannibals to death by torture. She is learned and curious, not having left these caves for two thousand years. She is a brilliant chemist, a philosopher, and scholar, translating for Holly the text the ancient citizens of Kor left on their walls because she taught herself their language. Unconscious Leo may be the love of her millennia-long life, but it’s Holly she talks to. Clearly, Holly is a much better choice of consort for this wise and ancient queen, except for the whole love-of-her-life thing and Leo’s gilded good looks.

Once Ayesha sees Leo, she recognizes the truth. Ustane is merely a speed-bump on the road to timeless love. Ayesha, a creature of many powers, (not magic, she tells Holly, just powers he can’t understand), plans to share the secret of her long life with both men. Then, immortal, Leo and Ayesha will rule the world. The men doubt that they can persuade Ayesha out of this plan. Leo thinks he can function as a conscience for her, but Holly, older and more experienced, has already seen the corrupting influence Ayesha has had on Leo.

The final chapters play out in the deserted city of Kor and deep in the heart of another mountain, in a hidden chamber with a mysterious fountain of light that seems to come from the center of the earth itself.

Haggard’s book is full of both careless bigotry and acerbic comments about women. Some isn’t exactly bigotry. Ayesha says she disliked the pre-Christian Jews because they wouldn’t let her argue philosophy in their temples. However, when Holly is first being taken to meet Ayesha, he remarks to himself that he “did not feel overwhelmed with gratitude at the prospect of seeing some savage, dusky queen:’

So, fortified by an insular prejudice against ‘kootooing,’[kowtowing] which has, like most of our so-called prejudices, a good deal of common sense to recommend it, I marched in boldly after Billali.

Later, Ayesha moves aside the curtain she sits behind with “a most beautiful white hand, white as snow...”

This is uncomfortable to read, yet Holly is a real character and I care about what happens to him. Leo is little more than a sex-object, but Ustane and Ayesha both are strong characters with believable motivations, flaws and fears. Maybe Haggard’s attitude toward women came from the fact that he found them powerful and fascinating, and, apparently, alien.

Though the trope of the “British adventurer” has not worn well in 130 years, Haggard’s descriptions are lovely, vivid, sprinkled with wit. She’s potpourri of styles — adventure? Gothic? Morality tale? — gave me vertigo but I still enjoyed it. Holly is a good character and a good narrator. As for Ayesha, I leave you with Holly’s words about her:

...her wickedness had not detracted from her charm. Indeed, I am by no means certain that it did not add to it. It was after all of a grand order, there was nothing mean or small about Ayesha.

We’ve changed in many ways in 130 years, and in many ways we haven’t. She is a century-old mirror, showing us both. —Marion Deeds

Ayesha, the Return of She

H. Rider Haggard returns to his story of star-crossed lovers Ayesha and Leo Vincey in Ayesha, the Return of She. The sequel was published in 1905, nearly twenty years after the publication of She. The world has changed, and Haggard’s storytelling has changed to match.

Haggard remains best known for King Solomon’s Mines, and She is the book of most interest to literary scholars. Ayesha, the Return of She is a decent sequel that does very little to open a window on the thoughts, values and fears of the late Victorian/early Edwardian era. Ayesha has more adventure and action, but characterization is diluted, especially that of Ayesha herself.

When this adventure begins, H. Horace Holly and his adopted son Leo Vincey are back in England. Leo is pining for his lost love Ayesha, who transformed or vanished deep in the mountains of Kor in Africa. Leo is so despondent he considers suicide:

Does a man stretched in some torture-den commit a crime if he snatches a knife and kills himself, Horace? Perhaps; but surely that sin should find forgiveness — if torn flesh and quivering nerves may plead for mercy. I am such a man, and I will use that knife and take my chance. She is dead, in death at least I shall be nearer her.

A vivid dream of Ayesha restores Leo’s hope. He tells Holly he intends to go to Central Asia to search for an image of the Egyptian ankh or crux ansata that appeared in the dream. Holly, originally skeptical, soon receives a sign of the crux ansata himself and agrees to go along.

Twelve years pass as Holly and Leo search for the landmarks of Leo’s dream. By now Leo is in his early forties and Holly his sixties, but these tough men go for days without food, hike through hip-high snow, and climb mountains. They find a Buddhist monastery that appeared in Leo’s dream, and the monks take them in for the winter. The monks tell them about a volcano and a strange sect ruled by a priestess in a secret valley over the mountains. As soon as the weather changes, Leo and Horace set out. Soon they see the blazing shape of the looped cross, many miles away, on top of a mountain. Hiking down toward the floor of the valley, they are caught in an avalanche and plunged into the rushing torrent of a frigid river. A beautiful and regal-looking woman and her shaman uncle rescue them.

The woman is named Atene and she is the Khania or co-ruler of this secret kingdom settled by a lost regiment of Alexander the Great. The valley lies in the shadow of the great volcano where for centuries a sect has worshipped a “spirit of nature.” While Holly and Leo recuperate from their near-drowning, Atene becomes infatuated by Leo. Atene takes credit for rescuing them, but Holly, that consummate eavesdropper, overhears a conversation where Atene and her Uncle Simbri discuss the summons “from the mountain” to wait by the river that morning. Soon it emerges that Atene is married to Khan Rassan, a dangerous, jealous madman. She wed him only to end a civil war and unite her people, she says. Rassan’s pastimes include hunting people down from horseback with his pack of slavering Death Hounds, and drinking. Leo thinks this proud and beautiful woman might be Ayesha. Holly is dubious, and he, of course is, right. She is not Ayesha but the reincarnation of Amenartas, the woman who first loved the Priest of Isis named Kalikrates, who has reincarnated as Leo.

Holly and Leo gather enough information about the mountain temple to decide that Ayesha may be hiding there. They plan to sneak away, and surprisingly, Rassan agrees to help them. His help proves treacherous, as Holly realizes when, on a rest stop, he notices something odd about their horses’ hooves.

I thought awhile, then a terrible idea struck me. ‘I don’t want to frighten you,’ I said, ‘but I think that we had better saddle up and get on.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Because I believe that villain of a Khan has doctored our horses.’
‘What for? To make them go lame?’
‘No, Leo, to make them leave a strong scent upon dry ground.’
He turned pale. ‘You mean — those hounds?’
I nodded. Then wasting no more time in words, we saddled up in frantic haste. Just as I fastened the last strap on my saddle I thought that a faint sound reached my ear. ‘Listen,’ I said, and now there was no doubt about it. It was the sound of baying dogs.

Leo, who was passive throughout She, becomes an action hero in this book. He fights Rassan, and later, as they are being guided up the mountain, rescues a village woman who has been slated for burning as a witch by the village’s corrupt shaman. The real story here, again, though, is about the two women who fight over Leo.

Avalanches and fight scenes aside, the problem with this book is simple. To be blunt, Leo as a character is not man enough to live up to the love of Ayesha, an immortal spirit, or even Atene. In Ayesha, the Return of She, Haggard tries to deal with this by changing Ayesha. In She, she was a godlike being with no human frailties or human moralities, beautiful and terrifying. In Ayesha, she has become more traditionally “feminine” (although markedly more ethereal). She scolds, manipulates, weeps when she can’t get her way, and worst of all, taunts her rival Atene in a very human, “mean girl” manner. Where did Ayesha, who was sequestered in the caves of Kor for two thousand years, and then trapped in another body for twelve more in this volcanic mountain temple, learn these nasty drawing-room behaviors?

Although pleased to be reunited with Leo, Ayesha is still working on her hobby of ruling the world. This time, she plans to do it with gold, because Ayesha can manufacture it. Yes, she can transmute iron into gold. This is a delightful and intriguing subplot that does add to the suspense, until it is completely forsaken once Atene commits an act of war against Ayehsa, and Leo is in jeopardy again.

Atene is powerfully characterized as a driven woman, whose dislike of her husband and men generally has allowed her to make a virtue of her emotional repression, until her passions are ignited by Leo. Rassan, the murderous madman, is someone I actually felt sorry for. Ayesha, even though she hints at being something darker and more compelling, is diminished to the point of being just the prettiest girl at the party, until the end of the book when she suddenly unleashes her power.

The last chapters of the book, with Ayesha calling down the elements; wind, lightning and rain, are dramatic, exciting and wild. The climax is poignant, if not too surprising. As an adventure story — a Romance — this book is probably better constructed than She, but it does not hold my interest as well. Throughout the book it is the side-stories and hints that have held interest — the transmutation magic, Ayesha’s constant, careful hints about her real nature, even the genesis of Atene’s kingdom. At the end, Haggard never manages to convince me that this love, sprung out of jealousy and murder, is an eternal, soul-mate connection. The book has humor and some fine action sequences taken by themselves, but as a whole, it is far slighter than the first. —Marion Deeds