Part 1 (1/2)

She and Allan

by H Rider Haggard

NOTE BY THE LATE MR ALLAN QUATERMAIN

My friend, into whose hands I hope that all these manuscripts ofto say to you

A long while ago I jotted down in it the history of the events that it details with more or less completeness This I did for my own satisfaction You will have noted how memory fails us as we advance in years; we recollect, with an almost painful exactitude, e experienced and saw in our youth, but the happenings of our middle life slip away fro landscape overflowed by grey and nebulous mist Far off the sun still seems to shi+ne upon the plains and hills of adolescence and earlyhours of our age, that ground on which we stand to-day, but the valley between is filled with fog Yes, even its pro events of that past, often are lost in this confusing fog

It was an appreciation of these truths which led h of course e and splendid creature whom I knew under the names of Ayesha, or Hiya, or She-who-commands; not indeed with any view to their publication, but before I forgot theht re-peruse thee to which I hope to attain

Indeed, at the tiiven to the world even after my own death, because they, or many of them, are so unusual that I feared lest they should cause smiles and in a way cast a slur upon my memory and truthfulness Also, as you will read, as to this matter I made a prouard the secrets of others For these reasons I proposed, in case I neglected or forgot to destroy them myself, to leave a direction that this should be done by my executors Further, I have been careful to make no allusion whatever to the else that I e ofknown only to myself Therefore, too, I never so much as hinted of them to anyone, not even to yourself to whom I have told sothis expedition and its issues, simply and with as much exactness as I could, and laid theain, since aether with the probleettable nature

Also, whenever any of Ayesha's sayings or stories which are not preserved in these pages came back to me, as has happened from time to time, I jotted the these notes you will find a history of the city of Kor as she told it to me, which I have omitted here Still, many of these remarkable events did e does froraph, till only their outlines reuishable

To tell the truth, I was rather ashaure On reflection it was obvious to h honesty had compelled me to set out all that is essential exactly as it occurred, adding nothing and taking nothing away, that I had been the victie woman, whom I had met in the ruins of a place called Kor, without any doubt had thrown a glamour over my senses and at the moment almost caused me to believe much that is quite unbelievable

For instance, she had told me ridiculous stories as to interviews between herself and certain heathen Goddesses, though it is true that, almost with her next breath, these she qualified or contradicted Also, she had suggested that her life had been prolonged far beyond our mortal span, for hundreds and hundreds of years, indeed; which, as Euclid says, is absurd, and had pretended to supernatural powers, which is still more absurd Moreover, by a clever use of soned to transport me to some place beyond the earth and in the Halls of Hades to shohat is veiled froe warrior Uaas of the Axe, ith Hans, a Hottentot, was s equally incredible, such as her appearance, when all seemed lost, in the battle with the troll-like Rezu To omit these, the sum of it was that I had been shamefully duped, and if anyone finds himself in that position, as most people have at one tiests that he had better keep the circumstances to himself

Well, so the matter stood, or rather lay in the recesses of my mind-and in the cupboard where I hidesomeone, as a matter of fact it was Captain Good, an individual of romantic tendencies who is fond, soht a book to this house which he insisted over and over again really Ithat it was a novel I declined, for to tell the truth I a a person who has found the hard facts of life of sufficient interest as they stand

Reading I ade is limited I study the Bible, especially the Old Testament, both because of its sacred lessons and of the e of its inspired translators; whereof that of Ayesha, which I render so poorly fro and melodious Arabic, reminded me For poetry I turn to Shakespeare, and, at the other end of the scale, to the Ingoldsby Legends, many of which I know almost by heart, while for current affairs I content myself with the newspapers

For the rest I peruse anything to do with ancient Egypt that I happen to come across, because this land and its history have a queer fascination for me, that perhaps has its roots in occurrences or dreaain I read one of the Latin or Greek authors in a translation, since I regret to say that inal But for h from time to time I sample it in a railway train and occasionally am amused by such excursions into the poetic and unreal

So it came about that the more Good bothered me to read this particular ro of the sort Being a persistent person, however, when he went away about ten o'clock at night, he deposited it by ht not be overlooked Thus it calyphics in an oval on the cover, also the title, and underneath it your own name, my friend, all of which excitedindeed of one word, ”She”

I took up the work and on opening it the first thing ht of which made my heart stand still, so painfully did it remind me of a certain veiled wo froe one word seemed to leap at me It was Kor! Now of veiled women there are plenty in the world, but were there also two Kors?

Then I turned to the beginning and began to read This happened in the autumn when the sun does not rise till about six, but it was broad daylight before I ceased froh that book

Oh! as I toof old Billali, who, by the way lied, probably to order, when he told Mr Holly that no white looain I found myself face to face with She-who-commands, now rendered as She-who--in her case at least; yes, with Ayesha the lovely, the eful and the iaps inas half divine (though, I think, rather wicked or at any rate unmoral in her way) and yet all wohts very different froher than those in which she had presented herself to me Yet the substratum of her character was the same, or rather of her characters, for of these she see, as she said of herself to me, ”not One but Many and not Here but Everywhere”

Further, I found the story of Kallikrates, which I had set down as a mere falsehood invented for my bewilderment, expanded and explained Or rather not explained, since, perhaps that she ht deceive, to me she had spoken of this murdered Kallikrates without enthusiasm, as a handsome person to whom, because of an indiscretion of her youth, she was bound by destiny and whose return-somewhat to her sorrow-she h in the end when she bared her heart at the moment of our farewell, she vowed she loved him only and was ”appointed” to his of which I knew nothing, such as the Fire of Life with its fatal gift of indefinite existence, although I reaas defeated, she did talk of a ”Cup of Life” of which she had drunk, that ht have been offered to my lips, had I been politic, bowed the knee and shown more faith in her and her supernatural pretensions

Lastly I saw the story of her end, and as I read it I wept, yes, I confess I wept, although I feel sure that she will return again Now I understood why she had quailed and even see beyond endurance by her witcheries and sarcasested that even for her with all her powers, Fate ht reserve one of its shrewdest blows Some prescience had told her that if the words seeh, and this was the worst of it, she did not knoeapon would deal the stroke or when and where it was doomed to fall

I was amazed, I was overcome, but as I closed that book I made up my mind, first that I would continue to preserve absolute silence as to Ayesha andmy life, I was bound by oath to do, and secondly that I would not cause my manuscript to be destroyed I did not feel that I had any right to do so in viehat already had been published to the world There let it lie to appear one day, or not to appear, as ive Good back his book without comment and-buy another copy!

One more word It is clear that I did not touch e of the real Ayesha In a thousand ways she bewitched and deceived me so that I never plumbed her nature's depths Perhaps this was my own fault because from the first I shewed a lack of faith in her and she wished to pay me back in her own fashi+on, or perhaps she had other private reasons for her secrecy Certainly the character she discovered to me differed in many ways from that which she revealed to Mr Holly and to Leo Vincey, or Kallikrates, whoe

She told ht it fit that I should know, and no e, Yorkshi+re

SHE AND ALLAN

CHAPTER I

THE TALISMAN

I believe it was the old Egyptians, a very wise people, probably indeed much wiser than we know, for in the leisure of their as, who declared that each individual personality is h the Bible only allows us three, namely, body, soul, and spirit The body that the ht which perhaps I, an ignorant person, do not, was but a kind of sack or fleshly covering containing these different principles Or mayhap it did not contain them all, but was simply a house as it were, in which they lived froh one or h to keep the place warestion, for what right have I, Allan Quater and probably erroneous deductions, to foryptians? Still these, as I understand them, suffice to furnish me with the text that man is not one, but many, in which connection it may be re the home of many demons, seven, I think Also, to come to another far-off exa inhabited by ”aI am quite sure, we are not always the same Different personalities actuate us at different times In one hour passion of this sort or the other is our lord; in another we are reason itself In one hour we follow the basest appetites; in another we hate theh our mortal murk shi+nes within or above us like a star In one hour our desire is to kill and spare not; in another we are filled with the holiest compassion even towards an insect or a snake, and are ready to forgive like a God Everything rules us in turn, to such an extent indeed, that so

Now the reason of all this hoinative of persons, just a homely, half-educated hunter and trader who chances to have seen a good deal of the particular little world in which his lot was cast, at one period of s

I areat bereavements in my time such as have seared my soul, since, perhaps because of my rather pri By day or night I can never forget those whom I have loved and whom I believe to have loved me

For you know, in our vanity some of us are apt to hold that certain people e have been intimate upon the earth, really did care for us and, in our still greater vanity-or should it be called ine that they still care for us after they have left the earth and entered on sos which, if they exist, inferentially are enial than any they can have experienced here At times, however, cold doubts strike us as to thisto know the truth Also behind looms a still blacker doubt, namely whether they live at all

For some years of my lonely existence these probleth I desired above everything on earth to lay them at rest in one way or another Once, at Durban, I met a man as a spiritualist to whohed at reatest ease All I had to do was to visit a certain localI wanted to know Although I rather grudged the guinea, being more than usually hard up at the time, I called upon this person, but over the results of that visit, or rather the lack of theing, however, reyood and spiritually- his shoulders and refer htly I doubt not, that hat it reveals I ought to be contented Then I read certain mystical books which were recommended to me These were full of fine words, undiscoverable in a pocket dictionary, but really tookthat I could not have inventedthe, or rather samples of him, for he is very copious, but without satisfactory results [Ha!-JB]

Then I gave up the business

So near the Black Kloof where he dwelt, I paid a visit to my acquaintance of whom I have written elsewhere, the wonderful and ancient dwarf, Zikali, known as ”The-Thing-that-should-never-have-been-born,” alsothe Zulus as ”Opener-of-Roads” When we had talked of s connected with the state of Zululand and its politics, I rose to leave forin the Black Kloof if it could be avoided

”Is there nothing else that you want to askhair and looking at-I had alh-e, Macu written on yourto do with spirits”

Then I reh in truth I had never thought of propounding them to Zikali