AYESHA SERIES – Complete Collection: She (A History of Adventure) + Ayesha (The Return of She) + She & Allan + Wisdom's Daughter E-Book
Henry Rider Haggard
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
The AYESHA SERIES - Complete Collection gathers the seminal works of Henry Rider Haggard, including 'She,' 'Ayesha,' 'She & Allan,' and 'Wisdom's Daughter.' These narratives conjure a rich tapestry of adventure, combining Victorian sensibilities with elements of myth, fantasy, and exoticism. Haggard employs a vivid and evocative literary style, immersing readers in the mysterious realms of Africa and the supernatural. This collection emphasizes themes of power, gender, and the consequences of imperialism, providing a multifaceted exploration of the era's cultural anxieties and fascinations. Henry Rider Haggard, a pioneer of the adventure genre, was influenced by his experiences in colonial Africa and the broader socio-political dynamics of the late 19th century. His fascination with ancient civilizations, combined with his deep curiosity about mysticism and the human condition, culminated in the creation of Ayesha, a character who embodies both allure and menace. Haggard's perspective as a keen observer of the complexities of empire plays a critical role in shaping these narratives, revealing deep insights into the nature of power and desire. This comprehensive collection is a must-read for enthusiasts of classic adventure literature and those interested in the undercurrents of gender and colonialism. Haggard's ambitious storytelling and enduring characters promise an enthralling journey that challenges societal norms while navigating the shadows of history, making it essential reading for anyone captivated by the interplay of myth and adventure. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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AYESHA SERIES – Complete Collection: She (A History of Adventure) + Ayesha (The Return of She) + She & Allan + Wisdom's Daughter
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection brings together the complete narrative arc of Henry Rider Haggard’s Ayesha cycle, assembling the four novels that define one of the most enduring figures in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular fiction. By presenting She: A History of Adventure, Ayesha: The Return of She, She and Allan, and Wisdom’s Daughter in a single volume, the edition offers a continuous experience of Haggard’s evolving vision. Readers can follow the conception, development, and elaboration of Ayesha—an immortal ruler whose presence shapes quests, revelations, and moral dilemmas—across decades of the author’s career, encountering a unified body of work that explores adventure, antiquity, and the allure and peril of absolute power.
All four texts in this volume are novels, firmly rooted in the adventure romance tradition while incorporating elements of the lost-world tale, fantasy, and the supernatural. They combine expedition narratives and frontier episodes with meditations on history, myth, and belief. The cycle moves fluidly between the dramatic momentum of pursuit and escape and the contemplative atmosphere of ancient ruins and sacred rites. While each book can be read independently, the collection invites appreciation of the shared cast of characters, recurring motifs, and cross-references that tie the narratives together, including a notable crossover with Haggard’s Allan Quatermain series in She and Allan.
The Ayesha novels were written over a substantial span of years, marking distinct phases of Haggard’s literary development and the changing tastes of late Victorian and Edwardian audiences. She: A History of Adventure appeared in 1887; Ayesha: The Return of She followed in 1905; She and Allan in 1921; and Wisdom’s Daughter in 1923. Read together, they chart Haggard’s sustained engagement with the figure of an immortal woman and the moral, historical, and metaphysical questions she raises. The progression also reflects the period’s fascination with archaeology, comparative religion, and global exploration, which Haggard channels into fiction that is at once sensational and reflective.
She: A History of Adventure introduces a scholar and his ward who journey into a remote African region and encounter Ayesha, an immortal queen whose authority rests on ancient knowledge and a fearsome charisma. The novel’s premise blends a hazardous expedition with the discovery of a hidden realm, conjuring vast ruins, ritual spaces, and signs of a vanished civilization. Its energy lies in the interplay between empirical curiosity and numinous mystery, between Victorian rationalism and an encounter that resists tidy explanation. Themes of devotion, temptation, and the weight of the past animate a narrative that defines the cycle’s tone and imaginative reach.
Ayesha: The Return of She carries the quest beyond Africa to an austere and forbidding landscape, intensifying the cycle’s metaphysical ambitions. The journey leads through high passes and isolated strongholds, where spiritual discipline and worldly power intertwine. The novel extends the inquiry into destiny, faith, and authority, setting human loyalty and fear against the austere grandeur of mountains, ice, and flame. While developing the central relationships established earlier, it broadens the series’ geographic and philosophical horizons, exploring how ideals of purity and transcendence contend with the frailty of human will and the pressures of politics, superstition, and tradition.
She and Allan links the Ayesha cycle with Haggard’s celebrated Allan Quatermain adventures, bringing the pragmatic hunter and explorer into narrative contact with the enigmatic queen. Set in Africa and framed as a prequel, it traces a quest sparked by questions about mortality and the afterlife, staging encounters where skepticism, custom, and supernatural awe collide. The crossover underscores Haggard’s interconnected storytelling, using Allan’s seasoned perspective to test and illuminate the mysteries surrounding Ayesha. The novel highlights contrasts between frontier realism and visionary experience, emphasizing how courage, curiosity, and humility mediate between the known world and the realm of legend.
Wisdom’s Daughter turns inward, offering an account centered on Ayesha herself and tracing the origins of her learning, ambition, and authority. Set in an ancient milieu, it provides a sustained portrait of her formative experiences, intellectual rigor, and political insight. The novel deepens the cycle’s exploration of motive and consequence, shifting emphasis from external discovery to the forging of identity and the management of power. In doing so, it complements the expeditionary energy of the earlier books with a reflective, character-driven approach, inviting readers to consider how knowledge, purpose, and self-mastery shape destiny within, and across, the vast sweep of time.
Across the series, unifying themes emerge: the lure and burden of immortality; the tension between reason and wonder; the fragility and resilience of love; and the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations. Haggard continually stages encounters between modern travelers and ancient orders, using ruins, prophecies, and rites to dramatize the dialogue between present and past. Power is tested not only in battle or intrigue but in the more perilous arenas of conscience and belief. The narrative gaze dwells on grandeur and decay alike, inviting readers to weigh the value of endurance, sacrifice, and sovereignty against the limits of human desire.
Stylistically, the Ayesha novels are marked by vivid descriptive set pieces, a steady accumulation of wonder, and framing devices that emphasize documents, reminiscences, and testimony. Haggard often relies on first-person narration, editorial asides, and embedded accounts to produce a sense of authenticity and immediacy. The prose alternates between brisk action and ceremonious spectacle, lingering over architecture, landscape, and ritual to evoke the gravity of the remote and the antique. Classical and scriptural allusions enrich the atmosphere, while recurring motifs—fire, veils, sealed chambers, perilous passages—reaffirm the series’ symbolic coherence and the interplay between revelation and restraint.
These works reflect the intellectual and cultural currents of their era, including the confidence and anxieties of imperial expansion and a fascination with non-European religions and histories. Readers may encounter depictions shaped by the perspectives and assumptions of the time, including orientalist framing and hierarchical attitudes. Engaging the novels today invites both critical awareness and appreciation for their narrative drive and imaginative ambition. The cycle’s enduring interest in cross-cultural contact, ethical choice, and the mystery of survival offers a complex field in which curiosity, empathy, and skepticism coexist, illuminating how popular fiction can both mirror and question its historical moment.
As a whole, the Ayesha cycle helped to consolidate the lost-world romance as a major strand of popular literature, extending the reach of adventure fiction toward the mythic and metaphysical. The figure of Ayesha—formidable, learned, and steadfast—has proved especially resonant, shaping discussions of charisma, gender, and the uses of knowledge in narrative. The books’ blend of exploration, antiquity, and moral testing has secured a lasting readership and inspired continued reengagement. By assembling the complete sequence, this collection foregrounds how Haggard transformed recurring concerns—memory, destiny, ruin, renewal—into a sustained artistic project with remarkable coherence and imaginative power.
This edition is designed to be read as an integrated journey. A straightforward publication-order approach—She: A History of Adventure; Ayesha: The Return of She; She and Allan; Wisdom’s Daughter—underscores the historical development of the cycle and the widening of its scope. Readers will find that the novels reward both continuous reading and selective revisiting, as scenes, symbols, and questions echo productively across volumes. Whether encountered as romance, speculative fiction, or philosophical fable, the series offers a complete and capacious experience, inviting reflection on courage, authority, and time. Gathered here, the Ayesha books present Haggard’s vision in its fullest narrative breadth.
Author Biography
Henry Rider Haggard was a British novelist of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, best known for vivid adventure romances set largely in Africa. Writing at a time when the British Empire loomed large in the public imagination, he helped define the imperial romance and popularized the lost world tale. His most enduring creations—big-game hunter Allan Quatermain and the enigmatic Ayesha from She—made him a household name across continents. Combining quest narratives, encounters with unfamiliar cultures, and a fascination with antiquity, Haggard’s fiction offered readers escapist spectacle and moral certainties that reflected, and sometimes interrogated, the assumptions of his age.
Raised in England, Haggard received a conventional education and later read law at Lincoln’s Inn. Although he trained for the bar, literary ambitions soon took precedence. His reading drew on the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, travel narratives, and classical and medieval legend; he also followed contemporary adventure writers. A lifelong interest in antiquity and folklore informed both his plots and world-building, often through collaboration and dialogue with scholars and enthusiasts. The discipline of legal study and the habits of wide reading gave him a facility for structure and pacing that would distinguish his tales from their earliest appearances.
As a young man he spent formative years in southern Africa, working within the British colonial administration during the late 1870s. Serving on the staff of senior officials in Natal and the Transvaal, he observed firsthand the politics of annexation, frontier tensions, and the complex societies of the region. These experiences supplied landscapes, episodes, and cultural reference points that recur throughout his fiction. Returning to Britain in the early 1880s, he continued legal studies and briefly practiced before turning decisively to writing. Early efforts established his themes and voice, preparing the ground for the rapid sequence of successes that followed.
His breakthrough came with King Solomon’s Mines, a mid-1880s phenomenon that introduced Allan Quatermain and helped codify the lost-world quest. Rapidly following were Allan Quatermain and She, the latter centering on the immortal Ayesha and blending adventure with a fascination for ancient civilizations. These books reached a wide international readership, were frequently reprinted, and quickly associated Haggard with fast-moving plots, striking scenery, and memorable figures. Their mixture of romance, peril, and archaeological speculation resonated with audiences attuned to exploration and empire, while their narrative momentum made them staples of circulating libraries and periodical culture as well as later re-issues.
Beyond these landmarks, Haggard ranged widely. African romances such as Nada the Lily explored Zulu settings; The People of the Mist pursued peril in remote regions; Montezuma’s Daughter and Cleopatra turned to pre-Columbian America and ancient Egypt; and Eric Brighteyes reimagined saga-age Iceland. He expanded the Allan Quatermain and Ayesha cycles across multiple sequels and prequels, and in The World’s Desire collaborated with Andrew Lang to fuse classical myth with romance. Alongside fiction he produced travel and agricultural writings, including A Farmer’s Year, Rural England, and The Poor and the Land, reflecting a sustained public interest in land, labor, and settlement.
Public engagement accompanied his literary career. In the early twentieth century he investigated rural conditions, argued for practical remedies to agricultural decline, and participated in official inquiries on land and settlement. His fiction, meanwhile, embodied attitudes typical of high imperial culture—confidence in empire, paternalism, and racial hierarchies—that modern readers scrutinize closely. Contemporary admirers praised his storytelling vigor, ingenuity of incident, and evocation of wild landscapes; later critics situate his work within the imperial romance tradition, tracing how it shaped popular ideas about exploration, antiquity, and otherness. This critical conversation increasingly reads Haggard both as entertainer and historical witness.
Haggard remained prolific into the 1910s and early 1920s, producing sequels, historical romances, and non-fiction that maintained his profile. He died in the mid-1920s in England. His works continued to circulate widely, inspiring numerous adaptations for stage, radio, film, and comics, and influencing later adventure, fantasy, and archaeology-themed fiction. Allan Quatermain and Ayesha endure as cultural touchstones, while the lost world template he popularized remains a flexible engine for storytelling. Today his books are read with awareness of their colonial contexts, yet their narrative drive and imaginative sweep keep them in print and under discussion in classrooms and beyond.
Historical Context
Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) wrote the Ayesha cycle across nearly four decades of rapid imperial expansion and cultural change. She: A History of Adventure appeared in serial form in The Graphic between October 1886 and January 1887 and in book form in 1887; Ayesha: The Return of She followed in 1905; She and Allan in 1921; and Wisdom’s Daughter in 1923. The sequence spans late-Victorian confidence, Edwardian anxiety, and the post–First World War world. Its recurrent figures—Ayesha, Allan Quatermain, Horace Holly, and Leo Vincey—travel through imagined spaces anchored in the geography and politics of the nineteenth-century British Empire, from East Africa and the Indian Ocean routes to Central Asian borderlands.
Haggard’s formative years in southern Africa (1875–1881) supplied first-hand experience of colonial administration and frontier conflict. He served under Sir Henry Bulwer in Natal and worked closely with Theophilus Shepstone during the 1877 annexation of the Transvaal. In 1878 he was appointed Master of the High Court in Pretoria, witnessing tensions that culminated in the First Boer War (1880–1881). The Zulu campaign of 1879, including the battles of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, and encounters with Zulu, Boer, and British officials shaped his understanding of authority, customary law, and the ethics of conquest—frameworks that inform the Ayesha narratives’ treatments of power, custodianship of the past, and cross-cultural rule.
The Scramble for Africa intensified after the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when European powers partitioned influence across the continent. Haggard’s readers were fascinated by explorers and cartographers who filled in the map’s blank spaces: David Livingstone’s journeys ended with his death at Chitambo in 1873; Henry Morton Stanley’s trans-African travels in the 1870s and 1880s captured imaginations; and Royal Geographical Society debates popularized new routes. She sends its travelers by established imperial corridors—the Mediterranean, Suez, Zanzibar, and Lamu on the East African coast—linking adventure to maritime realities. British consular influence at Zanzibar and anti-slavery diplomacy after the 1873 treaty with Sultan Barghash bin Said created a recognizable political backdrop.
Victorian print culture enabled Haggard’s rise. The Education Act of 1870 expanded literacy; illustrated weeklies like The Graphic (founded 1869) and mass-circulation publishers supplied serialized fiction to a growing middle-class audience. She’s serialization in 1886–1887 and rapid book publication by Longmans, Green and Co. in 1887 exemplify the synergy between periodical serialization and single-volume sales as the three-decker novel waned. Circulating libraries, railway bookstalls run by W. H. Smith, and overseas reprints disseminated adventure romances to British colonies and the United States. This infrastructure ensured that the Ayesha books, appearing again in 1905, 1921, and 1923, reached a public already schooled in imperial geography and Gothic sensation.
Archaeology’s spectacular nineteenth-century triumphs fed the Ayesha cycle’s ruins and lost civilizations. Austen Henry Layard’s excavations at Nineveh and Nimrud in the 1840s, Heinrich Schliemann’s work at Troy and Mycenae in the 1870s, and Flinders Petrie’s scientific methods in Egypt from the 1880s established models for reconstructing vanished worlds. Great Zimbabwe’s controversial attributions after 1871 and competing claims about Phoenician or African builders animated debates Haggard followed closely. The notion that imposing architectures, inscriptions, and ritual spaces might survive in remote landscapes legitimized fictional Kôr and similar settings. Tutankhamun’s tomb, discovered in November 1922 by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, renewed Egyptomania just before Wisdom’s Daughter appeared in 1923.
Victorian science framed the series’ speculations about origins, decay, and survival. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871), Herbert Spencer’s social evolutionism, and E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) offered narratives in which custom, myth, and ritual marked stages of development. James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) systematized comparative anthropology and ritual theory. Such texts normalized the idea that contemporary peoples might preserve practices from deep time. Haggard’s depictions of ordeals, sacred fires, and secret priesthoods reflect this intellectual climate, as do anxieties about degeneration, a fin-de-siècle theme amplified by medical and criminological theories associated with writers like Max Nordau in the 1890s.
Late-Victorian spiritualism and occult syncretism furnished additional context. The Theosophical Society, founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1875, popularized reincarnation, karma, and Eastern esoterica among Anglophone readers. The Society for Psychical Research, established in London in 1882, investigated mesmerism, telepathy, and apparitions with quasi-scientific seriousness. Periodicals reported séances alongside telegraphy and X-rays, blending marvel and modernity. The Ayesha cycle’s preoccupations with immortality, soul-transmigration, prophecy, and talismanic objects stand at the intersection of these currents. By the time Ayesha: The Return of She appeared in 1905 and the later prequel Wisdom’s Daughter in 1923, occult speculation had become a mainstream literary device rather than a marginal curiosity.
Debates over the New Woman shaped reception of powerful female figures. From the 1880s to the 1890s, writers such as Sarah Grand and Mona Caird triggered controversy over women’s education, marriage, and autonomy. Periodical cartoons and essays framed female authority as alluring and dangerous, while academic opportunities for women expanded at institutions like Girton College, Cambridge (founded 1869). Ayesha’s charisma, authority over subject peoples, and eroticized command echo fin-de-siècle anxieties about the femme fatale and the disruption of patriarchal order. The arc from She in 1887 through the 1905 sequel and the 1920s texts tracks changing attitudes as suffrage campaigns advanced toward partial enfranchisement in the United Kingdom in 1918.
Technological infrastructures underwrote credible adventure. The Suez Canal opened in 1869, reconfiguring imperial time and distance; steamship lines connected Liverpool and London to Alexandria, Aden, Zanzibar, and Bombay; submarine telegraphy linked ports to Whitehall and newspapers. The Maxim gun (patented 1884) and modern surveying equipment shifted power balances in colonial campaigning and mapping. Plans like Cecil Rhodes’s Cape to Cairo railway, even if incomplete, symbolized connective ambition. When Haggard’s characters embark from English docks toward East Africa or traverse Central Asian ranges, their journeys rely on a shared readerly sense of timetables, shipping routes, and consular havens that knit distant crises to metropolitan breakfast tables.
The Great Game between Britain and Russia in Central Asia supplied geopolitical texture for quests beyond Africa. Between 1865 and 1885 the Russian Empire annexed Tashkent, Khiva, Kokand, and Merv, pressing toward the Pamirs and the approaches to Kashmir. British missions to Kabul, Kashgar, and the Gilgit region monitored frontiers amid scares like Panjdeh in 1885. Geographers such as Sven Hedin mapped the Tarim Basin in the 1890s. Ayesha: The Return of She, published in 1905, reflects the allure of mountain fastnesses and contested passes, arriving on the eve of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention that stabilized spheres of influence from Persia to Tibet and redefined strategic anxieties.
Religious encounter was central to Britain’s nineteenth-century global presence. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) and London Missionary Society (LMS) anchored Protestant activity in East and Central Africa, Arabia, and the Indian Ocean littoral; translations of scripture and ethnographic reports circulated widely. On the coast, Omani Arab influence persisted from Muscat to Zanzibar, with Sultan Barghash bin Said reigning from 1870 to 1888. Anti-slavery treaties in 1873 and 1876 reshaped commerce but left entangled networks of ivory and caravan labor. The Ayesha books intertwine Islamic, classical, and pre-Christian ritual vocabularies against this backdrop, exploring rival claims to moral authority and civilizational prestige in a landscape of competing faiths.
Imperial self-scrutiny intensified after the South African conflicts. The First Boer War (1880–1881) coincided with Haggard’s return to England; the Second Boer War (1899–1902) exposed deficiencies in British military planning and public health, igniting debates over national efficiency. Names like Paul Kruger and Lord Roberts dominated headlines, while concentration camp scandals unsettled metropolitan confidence. These episodes affected the ethical coloration of adventure fiction, inviting reflection on conquest’s costs. When Ayesha reappears in 1905 and when Allan Quatermain crosses into her orbit in 1921, readers bring to the page memories of sieges, scorched earth, and ambiguous victories, complicating notions of simple heroic expansion common in the 1880s.
Haggard’s collaborations and friendships linked imperial romance to folklore studies. He worked closely with Andrew Lang (1844–1912), a classicist, anthropologist, and founder of the Folk-Lore Society in 1878; they co-authored The World’s Desire in 1890. Lang’s comparative method and enthusiasm for oral tradition resonated with Haggard’s framing devices—manuscripts, shards, and storytellers—that move narratives across epochs. Classical education, whether at Oxford, Cambridge, or through autodidact reading, primed British audiences to accept Greek, Arabic, and biblical echoes in exotic settings. The Ayesha cycle’s persistent dialogue with mythic archetypes—resurrected lovers, immortal queens, sacred flames—thus emerged from a vibrant late-Victorian traffic between scholarship, collecting, and popular romance.
Beyond fiction, Haggard engaged imperial policy and agrarian reform, experiences that broadened his comparative lens. Called to the bar in 1884, he later investigated land settlement and rural decline, publishing Rural England in 1902. From 1909 to 1917 he served on the Dominions Royal Commission, traveling through South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada to advise on governance and migration. Such inquiries into settlement patterns, law, and sustainability inform the Ayesha books’ attention to succession, stewardship of ruins, and the fates of peoples under long regimes. The oscillation between ancient polities and modern dominions echoes a statesman’s concern for continuity amid change.
Victorian and Edwardian norms of propriety and market constraint shaped tone and structure. Mudie’s Select Library favored morally legible narratives; publishers like Longmans, Green and Co. steered authors toward single-volume formats by the late 1880s as the three-decker collapsed. Illustrators and cover designers marketed exoticism through paratexts, while editors balanced sensationalism with decorum to avoid controversy on W. H. Smith’s railway stalls. The Ayesha cycle employs Gothic thrills—catacombs, veils, uncanny survivals—within limits acceptable to family reading. Periodical reviews in outlets like the Athenaeum and Saturday Review weighed ethnographic detail against romance, reinforcing a contract in which adventure trafficked in plausibility as well as wonder.
The First World War (1914–1918) reframed British understandings of heroism, sacrifice, and destiny. Wartime casualties, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and the 1919 Paris settlements shook imperial assurances. The 1921 She and Allan and the 1923 Wisdom’s Daughter appear in a culture alert to mourning and haunted by ruins at home as well as abroad. Simultaneously, the redrawing of the Middle East under League of Nations mandates and the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb revived debates about the stewardship of antiquities and the ethics of excavation. The series’ late installments thus speak to a Britain negotiating memory, mandate, and the afterlives of empire.
The Ayesha books entered a robust international afterlife through translations, stage versions, and early cinema adaptations in the 1910s and 1920s, which amplified their reach beyond the Anglophone world. She rapidly went through multiple editions after 1887 and remained one of the long sellers of adventure romance. Their fusion of imperial geography, occult speculation, and archaeological fantasy influenced later popular fiction, from lost-world narratives to planetary romances. By connecting East African ports like Zanzibar and Lamu to Central Asian fastnesses and antique Mediterranean imaginaries, the cycle distilled late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century preoccupations into a portable myth of power, desire, and the fragile stewardship of civilization.
Synopsis (Selection)
She: A History of Adventure
An English scholar and his ward follow a cryptic inheritance into the African interior, discovering a lost realm ruled by the immortal Ayesha, whose power and allure challenge their loyalties and beliefs about life and death.
Ayesha: The Return of She
Driven by visions and a pledge of reunion, Holly and Leo traverse Central Asia to a hidden mountain sanctuary, where ancient priesthoods and political intrigue lead them toward Ayesha and a renewal of their perilous bond.
She and Allan
Allan Quatermain, seeking proof of an afterlife, journeys with Umslopogaas to the domain of Ayesha, confronting warring tribes and occult trials as the Quatermain and Ayesha storylines converge.
Wisdom’s Daughter
Told from Ayesha’s perspective, this prelude traces her origins, training, and ascent to power, revealing the roots of her knowledge, pride, and enduring vow that shapes the events of the later tales.
AYESHA SERIES – Complete Collection: She (A History of Adventure) + Ayesha (The Return of She) + She & Allan + Wisdom’s Daughter
She: A History of Adventure
INTRODUCTION
In giving to the world the record of what, looked at as an adventure only, is I suppose one of the most wonderful and mysterious experiences ever undergone by mortal men, I feel it incumbent on me to explain what my exact connection with it is. And so I may as well say at once that I am not the narrator but only the editor of this extraordinary history, and then go on to tell how it found its way into my hands.
Some years ago I, the editor, was stopping with a friend, "vir doctissimus et amicus neus," at a certain University, which for the purposes of this history we will call Cambridge, and was one day much struck with the appearance of two persons whom I saw going arm-in-arm down the street. One of these gentlemen was I think, without exception, the handsomest young fellow I have ever seen. He was very tall, very broad, and had a look of power and a grace of bearing that seemed as native to him as it is to a wild stag. In addition his face was almost without flaw—a good face as well as a beautiful one, and when he lifted his hat, which he did just then to a passing lady, I saw that his head was covered with little golden curls growing close to the scalp.
"Good gracious!" I said to my friend, with whom I was walking, "why, that fellow looks like a statue of Apollo come to life. What a splendid man he is!"
"Yes," he answered, "he is the handsomest man in the University, and one of the nicest too. They call him 'the Greek god'; but look at the other one, he's Vincey's (that's the god's name) guardian, and supposed to be full of every kind of information. They call him 'Charon.'" I looked, and found the older man quite as interesting in his way as the glorified specimen of humanity at his side. He appeared to be about forty years of age, and was I think as ugly as his companion was handsome. To begin with, he was shortish, rather bow-legged, very deep chested, and with unusually long arms. He had dark hair and small eyes, and the hair grew right down on his forehead, and his whiskers grew right up to his hair, so that there was uncommonly little of his countenance to be seen. Altogether he reminded me forcibly of a gorilla, and yet there was something very pleasing and genial about the man's eye. I remember saying that I should like to know him.
"All right," answered my friend, "nothing easier. I know Vincey; I'll introduce you," and he did, and for some minutes we stood chatting—about the Zulu people, I think, for I had just returned from the Cape at the time. Presently, however, a stoutish lady, whose name I do not remember, came along the pavement, accompanied by a pretty fair-haired girl, and these two Mr. Vincey, who clearly knew them well, at once joined, walking off in their company. I remember being rather amused because of the change in the expression of the elder man, whose name I discovered was Holly, when he saw the ladies advancing. He suddenly stopped short in his talk, cast a reproachful look at his companion, and, with an abrupt nod to myself, turned and marched off alone across the street. I heard afterwards that he was popularly supposed to be as much afraid of a woman as most people are of a mad dog, which accounted for his precipitate retreat. I cannot say, however, that young Vincey showed much aversion to feminine society on this occasion. Indeed I remember laughing, and remarking to my friend at the time that he was not the sort of man whom it would be desirable to introduce to the lady one was going to marry, since it was exceedingly probable that the acquaintance would end in a transfer of her affections. He was altogether too good-looking, and, what is more, he had none of that consciousness and conceit about him which usually afflicts handsome men, and makes them deservedly disliked by their fellows.
That same evening my visit came to an end, and this was the last I saw or heard of "Charon" and "the Greek god" for many a long day. Indeed, I have never seen either of them from that hour to this, and do not think it probable that I shall. But a month ago I received a letter and two packets, one of manuscript, and on opening the first found that it was signed by "Horace Holly," a name that at the moment was not familiar to me. It ran as follows:—
"—— College, Cambridge, May 1, 18—
"My dear Sir,—You will be surprised, considering the very slight nature of our acquaintance, to get a letter from me. Indeed, I think I had better begin by reminding you that we once met, now some five years ago, when I and my ward Leo Vincey were introduced to you in the street at Cambridge. To be brief and come to my business. I have recently read with much interest a book of yours describing a Central African adventure. I take it that this book is partly true, and partly an effort of the imagination. However this may be, it has given me an idea. It happens, how you will see in the accompanying manuscript (which together with the Scarab, the 'Royal Son of the Sun,' and the original sherd, I am sending to you by hand), that my ward, or rather my adopted son Leo Vincey and myself have recently passed through a real African adventure, of a nature so much more marvellous than the one which you describe, that to tell the truth I am almost ashamed to submit it to you lest you should disbelieve my tale. You will see it stated in this manuscript that I, or rather we, had made up our minds not to make this history public during our joint lives. Nor should we alter our determination were it not for a circumstance which has recently arisen. We are for reasons that, after perusing this manuscript, you may be able to guess, going away again this time to Central Asia where, if anywhere upon this earth, wisdom is to be found, and we anticipate that our sojourn there will be a long one. Possibly we shall not return. Under these altered conditions it has become a question whether we are justified in withholding from the world an account of a phenomenon which we believe to be of unparalleled interest, merely because our private life is involved, or because we are afraid of ridicule and doubt being cast upon our statements. I hold one view about this matter, and Leo holds another, and finally, after much discussion, we have come to a compromise, namely, to send the history to you, giving you full leave to publish it if you think fit, the only stipulation being that you shall disguise our real names, and as much concerning our personal identity as is consistent with the maintenance of the bona fides of the narrative.
"And now what am I to say further? I really do not know beyond once more repeating that everything is described in the accompanying manuscript exactly as it happened. As regards She herself I have nothing to add. Day by day we gave greater occasion to regret that we did not better avail ourselves of our opportunities to obtain more information from that marvellous woman. Who was she? How did she first come to the Caves of Kôr, and what was her real religion? We never ascertained, and now, alas! we never shall, at least not yet. These and many other questions arise in my mind, but what is the good of asking them now?
"Will you undertake the task? We give you complete freedom, and as a reward you will, we believe, have the credit of presenting to the world the most wonderful history, as distinguished from romance, that its records can show. Read the manuscript (which I have copied out fairly for your benefit), and let me know.
"Believe me, very truly yours, "L. Horace Holly.1
"P.S.—Of course, if any profit results from the sale of the writing should you care to undertake its publication, you can do what you like with it, but if there is a loss I will leave instructions with my lawyers, Messrs. Geoffrey and Jordan, to meet it. We entrust the sherd, the scarab, and the parchments to your keeping, till such time as we demand them back again. —L. H. H."
This letter, as may be imagined, astonished me considerably, but when I came to look at the MS., which the pressure of other work prevented me from doing for a fortnight, I was still more astonished, as I think the reader will be also, and at once made up my mind to press on with the matter. I wrote to this effect to Mr. Holly, but a week afterwards received a letter from that gentleman's lawyers, returning my own, with the information that their client and Mr. Leo Vincey had already left this country for Thibet, and they did not at present know their address.
Well, that is all I have to say. Of the history itself the reader must judge. I give it him, with the exception of a very few alterations, made with the object of concealing the identity of the actors from the general public, exactly as it came to me. Personally I have made up my mind to refrain from comments. At first I was inclined to believe that this history of a woman on whom, clothed in the majesty of her almost endless years, the shadow of Eternity itself lay like the dark wing of Night, was some gigantic allegory of which I could not catch the meaning. Then I thought that it might be a bold attempt to portray the possible results of practical immortality, informing the substance of a mortal who yet drew her strength from Earth, and in whose human bosom passions yet rose and fell and beat as in the undying world around her the winds and the tides rise and fall and beat unceasingly. But as I went on I abandoned that idea also. To me the story seems to bear the stamp of truth upon its face. Its explanation I must leave to others, and with this slight preface, which circumstances make necessary, I introduce the world to Ayesha and the Caves of Kôr.—The Editor.
P.S.—There is on consideration one circumstance that, after a reperusal of this history, struck me with so much force that I cannot resist calling the attention of the reader to it. He will observe that so far as we are made acquainted with him there appears to be nothing in the character of Leo Vincey which in the opinion of most people would have been likely to attract an intellect so powerful as that of Ayesha. He is not even, at any rate to my view, particularly interesting. Indeed, one might imagine that Mr. Holly would under ordinary circumstances have easily outstripped him in the favour of She. Can it be that extremes meet, and that the very excess and splendour of her mind led her by means of some strange physical reaction to worship at the shrine of matter? Was that ancient Kallikrates nothing but a splendid animal loved for his hereditary Greek beauty? Or is the true explanation what I believe it to be—namely, that Ayesha, seeing further than we can see, perceived the germ and smouldering spark of greatness which lay hid within her lover's soul, and well knew that under the influence of her gift of life, watered by her wisdom, and shone upon with the sunshine of her presence, it would bloom like a flower and flash out like a star, filling the world with light and fragrance?
Here also I am not able to answer, but must leave the reader to form his own judgment on the facts before him, as detailed by Mr. Holly in the following pages.
1This name is varied throughout in accordance with the writer's request.—Editor.
I MY VISITOR
There are some events of which each circumstance and surrounding detail seems to be graven on the memory in such fashion that we cannot forget it, and so it is with the scene that I am about to describe. It rises as clearly before my mind at this moment as though it had happened but yesterday.
It was in this very month something over twenty years ago that I, Ludwig Horace Holly, was sitting one night in my rooms at Cambridge, grinding away at some mathematical work, I forget what. I was to go up for my fellowship within a week, and was expected by my tutor and my college generally to distinguish myself. At last, wearied out, I flung my book down, and, going to the mantelpiece, took down a pipe and filled it. There was a candle burning on the mantelpiece, and a long, narrow glass at the back of it; and as I was in the act of lighting the pipe I caught sight of my own countenance in the glass, and paused to reflect. The lighted match burnt away till it scorched my fingers, forcing me to drop it; but still I stood and stared at myself in the glass, and reflected.
"Well," I said aloud, at last, "it is to be hoped that I shall be able to do something with the inside of my head, for I shall certainly never do anything by the help of the outside."
This remark will doubtless strike anybody who reads it as being slightly obscure, but I was in reality alluding to my physical deficiencies. Most men of twenty-two are endowed at any rate with some share of the comeliness of youth, but to me even this was denied. Short, thick-set, and deep-chested almost to deformity, with long sinewy arms, heavy features, deep-set grey eyes, a low brow half overgrown with a mop of thick black hair, like a deserted clearing on which the forest had once more begun to encroach; such was my appearance nearly a quarter of a century ago, and such, with some modification, it is to this day. Like Cain, I was branded—branded by Nature with the stamp of abnormal ugliness, as I was gifted by Nature with iron and abnormal strength and considerable intellectual powers. So ugly was I that the spruce young men of my College, though they were proud enough of my feats of endurance and physical prowess, did not even care to be seen walking with me. Was it wonderful that I was misanthropic and sullen? Was it wonderful that I brooded and worked alone, and had no friends—at least, only one? I was set apart by Nature to live alone, and draw comfort from her breast, and hers only. Women hated the sight of me. Only a week before I had heard one call me a "monster" when she thought I was out of hearing, and say that I had converted her to the monkey theory. Once, indeed, a woman pretended to care for me, and I lavished all the pent-up affection of my nature upon her. Then money that was to have come to me went elsewhere, and she discarded me. I pleaded with her as I have never pleaded with any living creature before or since, for I was caught by her sweet face, and loved her; and in the end by way of answer she took me to the glass, and stood side by side with me, and looked into it.
"Now," she said, "if I am Beauty, who are you?" That was when I was only twenty.
And so I stood and stared, and felt a sort of grim satisfaction in the sense of my own loneliness; for I had neither father, nor mother, nor brother; and as I did so there came a knock at my door.
I listened before I went to open it, for it was nearly twelve o'clock at night, and I was in no mood to admit any stranger. I had but one friend in the College, or, indeed, in the world—perhaps it was he.
Just then the person outside the door coughed, and I hastened to open it, for I knew the cough.
A tall man of about thirty, with the remains of great personal beauty, came hurrying in, staggering beneath the weight of a massive iron box which he carried by a handle with his right hand. He placed the box upon the table, and then fell into an awful fit of coughing. He coughed and coughed till his face became quite purple, and at last he sank into a chair and began to spit up blood. I poured out some whisky into a tumbler, and gave it to him. He drank it, and seemed better; though his better was very bad indeed.
"Why did you keep me standing there in the cold?" he asked pettishly. "You know the draughts are death to me."
"I did not know who it was," I answered. "You are a late visitor."
"Yes; and I verily believe it is my last visit," he answered, with a ghastly attempt at a smile. "I am done for, Holly. I am done for. I do not believe that I shall see to-morrow."
"Nonsense!" I said. "Let me go for a doctor."
He waved me back imperiously with his hand. "It is sober sense; but I want no doctors. I have studied medicine and I know all about it. No doctors can help me. My last hour has come! For a year past I have only lived by a miracle. Now listen to me as you have never listened to anybody before; for you will not have the opportunity of getting me to repeat my words. We have been friends for two years; now tell me how much do you know about me?"
"I know that you are rich, and have had a fancy to come to College long after the age that most men leave it. I know that you have been married, and that your wife died; and that you have been the best, indeed almost the only friend I ever had."
"Did you know that I have a son?"
"No."
"I have. He is five years old. He cost me his mother's life, and I have never been able to bear to look upon his face in consequence. Holly, if you will accept the trust, I am going to leave you that boy's sole guardian."
I sprang almost out of my chair. "Me!" I said.
"Yes, you. I have not studied you for two years for nothing. I have known for some time that I could not last, and since I realised the fact I have been searching for some one to whom I could confide the boy and this," and he tapped the iron box. "You are the man, Holly; for, like a rugged tree, you are hard and sound at core. Listen; the boy will be the only representative of one of the most ancient families in the world, that is, so far as families can be traced. You will laugh at me when I say it, but one day it will be proved to you beyond a doubt, that my sixty-fifth or sixty-sixth lineal ancestor was an Egyptian priest of Isis, though he was himself of Grecian extraction, and was called Kallikrates.1 His father was one of the Greek mercenaries raised by Hak-Hor, a Mendesian Pharaoh of the twenty-ninth dynasty, and his grandfather or great-grandfather, I believe, was that very Kallikrates mentioned by Herodotus.[+] In or about the year 339 before Christ, just at the time of the final fall of the Pharaohs, this Kallikrates (the priest) broke his vows of celibacy and fled from Egypt with a Princess of Royal blood who had fallen in love with him, and was finally wrecked upon the coast of Africa, somewhere, as I believe, in the neighbourhood of where Delagoa Bay now is, or rather to the north of it, he and his wife being saved, and all the remainder of their company destroyed in one way or another. Here they endured great hardships, but were at last entertained by the mighty Queen of a savage people, a white woman of peculiar loveliness, who, under circumstances which I cannot enter into, but which you will one day learn, if you live, from the contents of the box, finally murdered my ancestor Kallikrates. His wife, however, escaped, how, I know not, to Athens, bearing a child with her, whom she named Tisisthenes, or the Mighty Avenger. Five hundred years or more afterwards, the family migrated to Rome under circumstances of which no trace remains, and here, probably with the idea of preserving the idea of vengeance which we find set out in the name of Tisisthenes, they appear to have pretty regularly assumed the cognomen of Vindex, or Avenger. Here, too, they remained for another five centuries or more, till about 770 A.D., when Charlemagne invaded Lombardy, where they were then settled, whereon the head of the family seems to have attached himself to the great Emperor, and to have returned with him across the Alps, and finally to have settled in Brittany. Eight generations later his lineal representative crossed to England in the reign of Edward the Confessor, and in the time of William the Conqueror was advanced to great honour and power. From that time to the present day I can trace my descent without a break. Not that the Vinceys—for that was the final corruption of the name after its bearers took root in English soil—have been particularly distinguished—they never came much to the fore. Sometimes they were soldiers, sometimes merchants, but on the whole they have preserved a dead level of respectability, and a still deader level of mediocrity. From the time of Charles II. till the beginning of the present century they were merchants. About 1790 by grandfather made a considerable fortune out of brewing, and retired. In 1821 he died, and my father succeeded him, and dissipated most of the money. Ten years ago he died also, leaving me a net income of about two thousand a year. Then it was that I undertook an expedition in connection with that," and he pointed to the iron chest, "which ended disastrously enough. On my way back I travelled in the South of Europe, and finally reached Athens. There I met my beloved wife, who might well also have been called the 'Beautiful,' like my old Greek ancestor. There I married her, and there, a year afterwards, when my boy was born, she died."
He paused a while, his head sunk upon his hand, and then continued—
"My marriage had diverted me from a project which I cannot enter into now. I have no time, Holly—I have no time! One day, if you accept my trust, you will learn all about it. After my wife's death I turned my mind to it again. But first it was necessary, or, at least, I conceived that it was necessary, that I should attain to a perfect knowledge of Eastern dialects, especially Arabic. It was to facilitate my studies that I came here. Very soon, however, my disease developed itself, and now there is an end of me." And as though to emphasise his words he burst into another terrible fit of coughing.
I gave him some more whisky, and after resting he went on—
"I have never seen my boy, Leo, since he was a tiny baby. I never could bear to see him, but they tell me that he is a quick and handsome child. In this envelope," and he produced a letter from his pocket addressed to myself, "I have jotted down the course I wish followed in the boy's education. It is a somewhat peculiar one. At any rate, I could not entrust it to a stranger. Once more, will you undertake it?"
"I must first know what I am to undertake," I answered.
"You are to undertake to have the boy, Leo, to live with you till he is twenty-five years of age—not to send him to school, remember. On his twenty-fifth birthday your guardianship will end, and you will then, with the keys that I give you now" (and he placed them on the table) "open the iron box, and let him see and read the contents, and say whether or no he is willing to undertake the quest. There is no obligation on him to do so. Now, as regards terms. My present income is two thousand two hundred a year. Half of that income I have secured to you by will for life, contingently on your undertaking the guardianship—that is, one thousand a year remuneration to yourself, for you will have to give up your life to it, and one hundred a year to pay for the board of the boy. The rest is to accumulate till Leo is twenty-five, so that there may be a sum in hand should he wish to undertake the quest of which I spoke."
"And suppose I were to die?" I asked.
"Then the boy must become a ward of Chancery and take his chance. Only be careful that the iron chest is passed on to him by your will. Listen, Holly, don't refuse me. Believe me, this is to your advantage. You are not fit to mix with the world—it would only embitter you. In a few weeks you will become a Fellow of your College, and the income that you will derive from that combined with what I have left you will enable you to live a life of learned leisure, alternated with the sport of which you are so fond, such as will exactly suit you."
He paused and looked at me anxiously, but I still hesitated. The charge seemed so very strange.
"For my sake, Holly. We have been good friends, and I have no time to make other arrangements."
"Very well," I said, "I will do it, provided there is nothing in this paper to make me change my mind," and I touched the envelope he had put upon the table by the keys.
"Thank you, Holly, thank you. There is nothing at all. Swear to me by God that you will be a father to the boy, and follow my directions to the letter."
"I swear it," I answered solemnly.
"Very well, remember that perhaps one day I shall ask for the account of your oath, for though I am dead and forgotten, yet I shall live. There is no such thing as death, Holly, only a change, and, as you may perhaps learn in time to come, I believe that even that change could under certain circumstances be indefinitely postponed," and again he broke into one of his dreadful fits of coughing.
"There," he said, "I must go, you have the chest, and my will will be found among my papers, under the authority of which the child will be handed over to you. You will be well paid, Holly, and I know that you are honest, but if you betray my trust, by Heaven, I will haunt you."
I said nothing, being, indeed, too bewildered to speak.
He held up the candle, and looked at his own face in the glass. It had been a beautiful face, but disease had wrecked it. "Food for the worms," he said. "Curious to think that in a few hours I shall be stiff and cold—the journey done, the little game played out. Ah me, Holly! life is not worth the trouble of life, except when one is in love—at least, mine has not been; but the boy Leo's may be if he has the courage and the faith. Good-bye, my friend!" and with a sudden access of tenderness he flung his arm about me and kissed me on the forehead, and then turned to go.
"Look here, Vincey," I said, "if you are as ill as you think, you had better let me fetch a doctor."
"No, no," he said earnestly. "Promise me that you won't. I am going to die, and, like a poisoned rat, I wish to die alone."
"I don't believe that you are going to do anything of the sort," I answered. He smiled, and, with the word "Remember" on his lips, was gone. As for myself, I sat down and rubbed my eyes, wondering if I had been asleep. As this supposition would not bear investigation I gave it up and began to think that Vincey must have been drinking. I knew that he was, and had been, very ill, but still it seemed impossible that he could be in such a condition as to be able to know for certain that he would not outlive the night. Had he been so near dissolution surely he would scarcely have been able to walk, and carry a heavy iron box with him. The whole story, on reflection, seemed to me utterly incredible, for I was not then old enough to be aware how many things happen in this world that the common sense of the average man would set down as so improbable as to be absolutely impossible. This is a fact that I have only recently mastered. Was it likely that a man would have a son five years of age whom he had never seen since he was a tiny infant? No. Was it likely that he could foretell his own death so accurately? No. Was it likely that he could trace his pedigree for more than three centuries before Christ, or that he would suddenly confide the absolute guardianship of his child, and leave half his fortune, to a college friend? Most certainly not. Clearly Vincey was either drunk or mad. That being so, what did it mean? and what was in the sealed iron chest?
The whole thing baffled and puzzled me to such an extent that at last I could stand it no longer, and determined to sleep over it. So I jumped up, and having put the keys and the letter that Vincey had left away into my despatch-box, and stowed the iron chest in a large portmanteau, I turned in, and was soon fast asleep.
As it seemed to me, I had only been asleep for a few minutes when I was awakened by somebody calling me. I sat up and rubbed my eyes; it was broad daylight—eight o'clock, in fact.
"Why, what is the matter with you, John?" I asked of the gyp who waited on Vincey and myself. "You look as though you had seen a ghost!"
"Yes, sir, and so I have," he answered, "leastways I've seen a corpse, which is worse. I've been in to call Mr. Vincey, as usual, and there he lies stark and dead!"
1The Strong and Beautiful, or, more accurately, the Beautiful in strength. [+] The Kallikrates here referred to by my friend was a Spartan, spoken of by Herodotus (Herod. ix. 72) as being remarkable for his beauty. He fell at the glorious battle of Platæa (September 22, B.C. 479), when the Lacedæmonians and Athenians under Pausanias routed the Persians, putting nearly 300,000 of them to the sword. The following is a translation of the passage, "For Kallikrates died out of the battle, he came to the army the most beautiful man of the Greeks of that day—not only of the Lacedæmonians themselves, but of the other Greeks also. He when Pausanias was sacrificing was wounded in the side by an arrow; and then they fought, but on being carried off he regretted his death, and said to Arimnestus, a Platæan, that he did not grieve at dying for Greece, but at not having struck a blow, or, although he desired so to do, performed any deed worthy of himself." This Kallikrates, who appears to have been as brave as he was beautiful, is subsequently mentioned by Herodotus as having been buried among the ἰρένες (young commanders), apart from the other Spartans and the Helots.—L. H. H.
II THE YEARS ROLL BY
As might be expected, poor Vincey's sudden death created a great stir in the College; but, as he was known to be very ill, and a satisfactory doctor's certificate was forthcoming, there was no inquest. They were not so particular about inquests in those days as they are now; indeed, they were generally disliked, because of the scandal. Under all these circumstances, being asked no questions, I did not feel called upon to volunteer any information about our interview on the night of Vincey's decease, beyond saying that he had come into my rooms to see me, as he often did. On the day of the funeral a lawyer came down from London and followed my poor friend's remains to the grave, and then went back with his papers and effects, except, of course, the iron chest which had been left in my keeping. For a week after this I heard no more of the matter, and, indeed, my attention was amply occupied in other ways, for I was up for my Fellowship, a fact that had prevented me from attending the funeral or seeing the lawyer. At last, however, the examination was over, and I came back to my rooms and sank into an easy chair with a happy consciousness that I had got through it very fairly.
Soon, however, my thoughts, relieved of the pressure that had crushed them into a single groove during the last few days, turned to the events of the night of poor Vincey's death, and again I asked myself what it all meant, and wondered if I should hear anything more of the matter, and if I did not, what it would be my duty to do with the curious iron chest. I sat there and thought and thought till I began to grow quite disturbed over the whole occurrence: the mysterious midnight visit, the prophecy of death so shortly to be fulfilled, the solemn oath that I had taken, and which Vincey had called on me to answer to in another world than this. Had the man committed suicide? It looked like it. And what was the quest of which he spoke? The circumstances were uncanny, so much so that, though I am by no means nervous, or apt to be alarmed at anything that may seem to cross the bounds of the natural, I grew afraid, and began to wish I had nothing to do with them. How much more do I wish it now, over twenty years afterwards!
