Complete Works of Henry Rider Haggard: 70+ Works In One Volume (Allan Quatermain Series, Ayesha Series, Lost World Novels, Short Stories, Essays & Autobiography) E-Book
Henry Rider Haggard
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The "Complete Works of Henry Rider Haggard" compiles over seventy literary pieces, showcasing the extraordinary range of Haggard's creativity. This compendium includes beloved adventure novels such as the Allan Quatermain series and the Ayesha series, alongside his captivating Lost World novels, revealing a unique blend of exploration, fantasy, and historical narrative. Haggard's prose is steeped in vivid imagery and rich detail, often illustrating the conflicts between civilization and the untamed wilderness. The book is critical within the context of late 19th-century literature, reflecting the Victorian fascination with exploration and colonialism while foreshadowing modern themes of existential inquiry and adventure narratives. Haggard, a key figure in adventure literature, drew from his own experiences in South Africa, where he worked as a land surveyor and lived among indigenous peoples. These rich experiences undoubtedly informed his storytelling, allowing him to create intricate worlds that merge personal history with mythical elements. His works not only entertain but critique the imperialistic ethos of his time, demonstrating the complex interplay of power and morality. This compilation is a must-read for enthusiasts of classic literature and adventure tales, providing an exhaustive insight into Haggard's imaginative worlds. For scholars and fans alike, this volume serves as an essential gateway into the mind of a pioneering author whose narratives continue to resonate with contemporary themes of exploration, identity, and cultural encounter. 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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Complete Works of Henry Rider Haggard: 70+ Works In One Volume (Allan Quatermain Series, Ayesha Series, Lost World Novels, Short Stories, Essays & Autobiography)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single volume gathers more than seventy works by Henry Rider Haggard, presenting a comprehensive panorama of his career across the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. It brings together the complete Allan Quatermain adventures, the Ayesha cycle, a wide array of historical and lost-world romances, a compact group of short stories, key non-fiction studies, and his autobiography. Conceived as an immersive author-in-full, the collection enables readers to trace recurring characters, ideas, and narrative strategies across decades. It highlights how Haggard developed a distinctive blend of high adventure, imaginative speculation, and moral inquiry that helped shape modern popular fiction.
The contents span multiple forms of prose narrative. They include series fiction anchored by Allan Quatermain and Ayesha, numerous standalone novels ranging from historical romance to speculative fantasy, a curated set of short stories, non-fiction works of reportage, travel, and social investigation, and an autobiography. There are no plays or verse, and the collection does not present letters or diaries. Instead, it concentrates on the genres in which Haggard worked most extensively: the romance of adventure, the historical novel, the lost-world tale, and reflective non-fiction grounded in contemporary public debates and personal experience.
Read as a whole, these works exhibit unifying themes that transcend individual plots. Exploration and encounter, the testing of courage and conscience, the interplay of love and power, and the human confrontation with mortality and belief recur throughout. Haggard’s stylistic hallmarks include swift pacing, vivid landscape description, frame narratives, and a frequent first-person vantage that fuses eyewitness immediacy with retrospective judgment. He mixes ethnographic detail as understood in his time with mythic patterning, shaping tales where ritual, prophecy, and law often drive action. The result is a body of work that probes destiny, duty, and the costs of ambition.
The Allan Quatermain sequence establishes the author’s signature mode: a seasoned hunter and guide recounts journeys across southern and eastern Africa, where peril, treasure, and unknown societies test his companions and himself. From King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain to Allan and the Holy Flower, The Ivory Child, The Ancient Allan, Heu-Heu, and beyond, the cycle moves between frontier realism and visionary romance. It explores friendship, leadership, and cultural exchange while scrutinizing the ethics of exploration. The series’ continuity allows themes to deepen across volumes without requiring knowledge of any single plot outcome for appreciation.
The Ayesha novels pursue a different but allied imaginative current. In She: A History of Adventure, Ayesha: The Return of She, Wisdom’s Daughter, and the crossover She and Allan, Haggard contemplates immortality, charisma, and the burden of absolute authority. The setting shifts to remote fastnesses and ancient remnants, where philosophical speculation and perilous passion companion the physical journey. These books press the romance form toward metaphysical inquiry, contrasting fragile human time with the apparent fixity of an undying will. The result is an enduring meditation on power’s seduction and the price of transcendence, framed by suspenseful, atmospheric storytelling.
Beyond these cycles lie historical romances ranging across time and place. Cleopatra, Pearl Maiden, Moon of Israel, Morning Star, Queen of the Dawn, and Belshazzar evoke antiquity through ceremonial detail and statecraft’s dilemmas. Eric Brighteyes reimagines saga-age Iceland with stark honor codes, while The Brethren and Red Eve trace medieval faith, chivalry, and catastrophe. The Lady of Blossholme looks to Tudor turmoil, and The Wanderer’s Necklace follows Northern and Byzantine worlds. In these works, Haggard fuses research with legend to dramatize destiny, loyalty, and the struggle between prophecy and human choice, sustaining narrative drive alongside historical atmosphere.
A second current travels outward into lost-world and global romances. Nada the Lily, Montezuma’s Daughter, The People of the Mist, Heart of the World, Queen Sheba’s Ring, Benita, The Ghost Kings, The Yellow God, and The Treasure of the Lake imagine encounters with vanished cities, sacred treasures, and disputed sovereignties. Speculative elements emerge in When the World Shook, Allan and the Ice-gods, Stella Fregelius, and Love Eternal, where wonder, catastrophe, prehistory, and psychical inquiry complicate adventure’s familiar rhythms. Across these books, Haggard tests the limits of discovery, asking what knowledge, faith, and identity endure when worlds collide.
Several novels turn to domestic, social, and satirical concerns. Mr. Meeson’s Will offers a sharp look at publishing and literary property, while Doctor Therne engages public health controversy through a cautionary narrative. Joan Haste, Jess, Beatrice, Fair Margaret, and Lysbeth examine love, class, and conscience under pressure. Swallow and The Way of the Spirit pursue moral and spiritual testing within wider historical currents. The Mahatma and the Hare adopts an allegorical fable’s clarity to reflect on compassion and suffering. Together they show Haggard’s range beyond expeditionary plots, using romance to interrogate law, duty, reputation, and reform.
The short stories collected here demonstrate Haggard’s talent for compression and atmosphere. Smith and the Pharaohs, The Blue Curtains, Little Flower, Only a Dream, and Barbara Who Came Back distill themes familiar from the novels into concentrated episodes. Egyptological fascination, uncanny returns, prophetic intimations, and the pull of memory thread through these narratives, often framed by diaries, confessions, or recollections. The shorter form foregrounds his economy of scene-setting, his feel for ritual and omen, and his ability to pivot from everyday detail to the marvellous in a few strokes, offering compact entries into his imaginative world.
The non-fiction works illuminate the historical and intellectual contexts behind the romances. Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - The Last Boer War analyzes political tensions among the Zulu kingdom, Boer settlers, and British authorities. A Winter Pilgrimage records travel and observation across Mediterranean and Near Eastern sites linked to antiquity. Regeneration surveys the social work of the Salvation Army in Great Britain and the United States. These studies reveal Haggard as a witness and commentator, attentive to policy, faith, and reform. They also disclose sources of landscape knowledge and ethical debate that inform his fictional architectures.
Days of My Life, Haggard’s autobiography, anchors the collection with a candid account of the experiences and convictions that shaped his writing life. It relates formative years, professional pursuits, travels, and the emergence of subjects that recur in the novels, from frontier administration and agriculture to literary craft. Read alongside the fiction and essays, it helps explain the steadiness of tone, the recurring questions about honor and duty, and the fascination with law, custom, and ceremony. The autobiography invites readers to consider how personal history can evolve into narrative patterns and symbolic preoccupations.
Taken together, these works form a coherent corpus whose energy, breadth, and narrative invention continue to invite new readings. Their significance lies not only in founding popular templates for the lost-race adventure and the imperial romance, but also in their persistent engagement with belief, justice, and the limits of human power. Readers may approach by series, follow a chronological arc, or group titles by region and theme, pairing fiction with non-fiction for context. However arranged, this volume offers a sustained encounter with a singular voice whose stories helped define modern adventure while probing the responsibilities it entails.
Author Biography
Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) was an English novelist whose adventure romances helped define late Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction. Best known for King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain, and She, he popularized the lost-world tale and the imperial romance, blending exploration, peril, and antiquity. His narratives, often set in southern Africa, drew wide readership across the English-speaking world and beyond. Haggard’s brisk storytelling, memorable figures, and fascination with ancient civilizations influenced later adventure and fantasy writers, as well as film and comics. While celebrated for narrative drive, his work is now also read through a critical lens attentive to colonial contexts and their assumptions.
Haggard’s formal schooling was limited, and he did not attend university, a fact he later turned to advantage by cultivating a self-directed literary education. After returning from colonial service, he studied law in London and was called to the bar, though writing quickly superseded legal practice. In terms of influences, he aligned with the late nineteenth-century revival of romance associated with historical and adventure traditions traceable to Sir Walter Scott and others. His engagement with classical and biblical motifs, coupled with contemporary travel and archaeological discourse, shaped the mythic scale of his plots and the moral tests his protagonists undergo.
A formative period in Haggard’s life unfolded in southern Africa in the mid-to-late 1870s, where he held posts in the British colonial administration in Natal and the Transvaal. He witnessed political upheaval and conflict during the era of annexation and its aftermath, encounters that furnished settings, characters, and ethnographic detail for his later fiction. The landscapes and oral traditions he encountered became central to his imaginative geography. Returning to England in the early 1880s, he read for the bar. The administrative discipline and observational habits cultivated abroad, together with an expanding market for romance, prepared the ground for his literary breakthrough.
King Solomon’s Mines (1885) propelled Haggard to instant celebrity, presenting Allan Quatermain as a hard-bitten guide in a quest narrative that helped crystallize the lost-world subgenre. Allan Quatermain (1887) extended the character’s reputation, while She (1887) introduced Ayesha, perhaps his most enduring creation, embodying themes of power, beauty, and mortality. These works balanced swift action with archaic mysteries, secret kingdoms, and ritual, tapping contemporary fascinations with exploration and antiquity. Their success established Haggard as a household name, led to wide serialization and translation, and set a template for subsequent novels that alternated between Africa-centered quests and historical romances.
Prolific and versatile, Haggard published further romances such as Allan’s Wife (1889), Eric Brighteyes (1891), Nada the Lily (1892), Montezuma’s Daughter (1893), and Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), along with later Allan Quatermain adventures like The Ivory Child (1916). He also wrote historical fiction including Cleopatra (1889). Beyond fiction, he pursued agricultural reform and imperial development, authoring studies such as A Farmer’s Year (1899), Rural England (1902), and The Poor and the Land (1905). His public service on agricultural inquiries and advocacy for rural improvement earned him official recognition, and he was knighted, reflecting a dual career in letters and policy.
Haggard’s novels were immensely popular with general readers, though critical opinion varied. Admirers praised narrative momentum, capacious imagining, and the evocation of awe; detractors noted melodrama and formula. His fiction reflects late nineteenth-century imperial thought, including assumptions about race and gender that attract scrutiny today. At the same time, recurrent concerns with mortality, loyalty, charisma, and the allure of antiquity give his stories an enduring psychological charge. Elements of mysticism and reincarnation, notably in She, mirror the era’s interest in spiritual and archaeological speculation. His clear prose, framed by episodic adventure and quest motifs, helped codify the adventure romance for subsequent generations.
Haggard continued to write into the early twentieth century while remaining active in public affairs related to agriculture and rural livelihoods. He died in 1925, leaving a body of work that has rarely fallen out of print. His novels inspired numerous adaptations for stage and screen; She and King Solomon’s Mines have been reimagined in multiple eras, and Allan Quatermain stands as a precursor to later pulp and cinematic adventurers. Modern readers approach his fiction both for its narrative pleasures and as a window onto Victorian and Edwardian imperial culture. Within literary history, he remains central to the genealogy of the lost-world and adventure romance.
Historical Context
Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) wrote across the late Victorian, Edwardian, and early interwar eras, transforming imperial experience into best‑selling romance, adventure, and speculative fiction. Born at Bradenham, Norfolk, he served in southern Africa (1875–1882), witnessing the British annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 and the volatile frontier that informs his South African books. From King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887) through sequences such as Allan Quatermain and Ayesha, he fashioned myths of exploration, conquest, and occult power that also refract contemporary debates on race, gender, science, law, and faith. His oeuvre blends popular fiction, travel narrative, historical reconstruction, and reformist non‑fiction.
Haggard’s rise coincided with the Scramble for Africa and the Berlin Conference (1884–85), when European powers partitioned regions they scarcely knew, guided by maps of the Royal Geographical Society. Public fascination with expeditions by David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley created a market for narratives of discovery, cartographic “blank spaces,” and secret kingdoms. That climate saturates adventure quests for mineral wealth and hidden civilizations in books like King Solomon’s Mines, Allan and the Holy Flower, The People of the Mist, and The Treasure of the Lake. The imagined “unknown” offered a stage for wonder and peril, and a moral testing ground for Victorian ideas about progress.
The Anglo‑Zulu War of 1879, marked by Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, and the politics surrounding King Cetshwayo (Cetywayo), form a vital backdrop. Haggard knew Natal and the Transvaal at first hand and published Cetywayo and His White Neighbours (1882) after his return to England, analyzing British, Boer, and Zulu relations. Zulu institutions, civil wars, and royal courts—vivid in works such as Nada the Lily and Child of Storm—reflect ethnographic curiosity shaped by colonial vantage. Allan Quatermain’s persona as a seasoned hunter‑interpreter emerges from this frontier milieu, where language skills, customary law, and shifting alliances determined survival as much as rifles and courage.
The Great Trek (c. 1835–1846) and the establishment of the Boer Republics—South African Republic (Transvaal) and Orange Free State—echo through Haggard’s frontier romances. He witnessed the British annexation (1877) and the tensions leading to the First Anglo‑Boer War (1880–81), followed by the larger Second Boer War (1899–1902). This settler world of commandos, laagers, and farmsteads informs the emotional landscapes of Swallow, Jess, and Lysbeth, as well as many Allan Quatermain episodes. The novels record a cultural encounter among English, Dutch‑speaking settlers, and African polities, revealing rival sovereignties, legal pluralism, and the persistence of trekker mythologies under the stress of modern empire.
Resource frontiers shaped both politics and plot. Diamonds at Kimberley (from 1867) and gold on the Witwatersrand (from 1886) drew capital, labor, and conflict, connecting figures such as Cecil Rhodes, Paul Kruger, and companies like De Beers to imperial strategy. Haggard’s narratives track this economy of desire: ivory caravans, concession hunting, and speculative concessions recur in The Ivory Child, Maiwa’s Revenge, and The Yellow God. The rush to extract wealth entwined with arms traffic, labor migrations, and conservation crises. Expeditions become moral assays: treasure tempts, but also destroys; indigenous expertise proves indispensable; and legality—treaties, deeds, tribal title—competes with brute force and frontier custom.
Late nineteenth‑century hunting culture—part sport, part provisioning, part commerce—gave Haggard a grammar for risk and character. Technological shifts from the Martini‑Henry (adopted 1871) to Lee‑Metford rifles (1888) and smokeless powder (cordite, 1889) altered pursuit and peril. His hunters weigh “sporting” codes against survival; African trackers and headmen display knowledge elites often ignore. Stories such as A Tale of Three Lions, Long Odds, and The Hunter Quatermain’s Story embed firearms lore, spoor reading, and caravan logistics, while registering ecological costs. The bush becomes a moral theatre where courage, cunning, and restraint compete with appetite and the market’s hunger for ivory.
Victorian “lost world” fantasies drew energy from archaeology and speculation. The ruins of Great Zimbabwe—popularized by Karl Mauch (1871) and later surveyed by Theodore Bent (1891)—provoked debates over African versus ancient Mediterranean builders, often misread through racialized lenses. Haggard adapted this mystery into romances of vanished cities, priesthoods, and survivals of antiquity: Elissa; or, The Doom of Zimbabwe, The People of the Mist, The Treasure of the Lake, and Heu‑Heu. Prehistoric and cyclical time enter with Allan and the Ice‑Gods, while She and Allan bridges mythic realms. These fictions exploit scholarly uncertainty, mixing ethnology, ritual, and conjecture to create compelling alternative pasts.
Egyptomania reshaped museums and print culture after Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1882. Excavators such as Flinders Petrie and E. A. Wallis Budge, and later Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, fed popular hunger for mummies, hieroglyphs, and queens. Haggard travelled there (A Winter Pilgrimage, 1901) and renewed pharaonic themes in Cleopatra (1889), Moon of Israel (1918), Queen of the Dawn (1925), and Wisdom’s Daughter (1923). He stages contests among priesthoods, soldiers, and sorcerers within famines, river regimes, and imperial rule. The Nile valley becomes a mirror for British power: ancient absolutisms, divine kingship, and monumental time refract modern anxieties about conquest and continuity.
A revival of medievalism and interest in the Icelandic sagas—nurtured by William Morris and scholarly translations—encouraged Haggard’s experiments beyond Africa. He wrote Eric Brighteyes (1891) in saga style and returned to chivalric and Crusading settings in The Brethren (1904), Fair Margaret (1907), Red Eve (1911), and The Wanderer’s Necklace (1914). These works recast honor, ordeal, and ordeal by combat through feuds, crusades, and plague. They also reflect debates about English national character, “Teutonic” heritage, and the romance of fealty at a time when industrial society and mass politics unsettled inherited hierarchies, offering readers escape into mythic codes of courage and fate.
Victorian and Edwardian Britain teemed with spiritualism, Theosophy (founded 1875), and psychical research (Society for Psychical Research, 1882). Seances, telepathy, and reincarnation flowed into Haggard’s supernatural romances. She: A History of Adventure (1887), Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), and She and Allan (1921) orbit an immortal queen whose charisma fuses eros and terror. Stella Fregelius (1904), Love Eternal (1918), and When the World Shook (1919) probe soul‑travel, afterlife, and cosmic cataclysm. These fictions mediate between scientific modernity and metaphysical hunger, casting occult knowledge as both temptation and revelation while testing the limits of reason, empire, and desire.
Debates on evolution, heredity, and public health permeate Haggard’s era. After smallpox controversies, Britain’s Vaccination Act (1898) introduced a conscientious objector clause, and Doctor Therne (1898) dramatized the consequences of anti‑vaccinationism. Social Darwinist anxieties about degeneration converse with his prehistoric and eugenic inflections, most overtly in Allan and the Ice‑Gods (composed late and published posthumously in 1927). Humanitarian sentiment also touched animal welfare (the RSPCA dates to 1824), echoed in allegorical works like The Mahatma and the Hare (1911). Across the oeuvre, science is exhilarating and unnerving—offering mastery through technology while unsettling certainties about progress, providence, and the boundaries of the human.
Haggard prospered in a changing print economy. Serialization in illustrated papers such as The Graphic (which ran She in 1886–87) and publication with Longmans, Green, and Co. propelled fame on both sides of the Atlantic. The Net Book Agreement (1890) and the U.S. International Copyright Act (1891) reshaped pricing and piracy. Mr. Meeson’s Will (1888) satirizes the literary marketplace and copyright. Collaborations and friendships—most notably with Andrew Lang, with whom he wrote The World’s Desire (1890)—linked him to folklore studies and comparative myth. Cheap editions, colonial libraries, and translations broadened his reach, embedding imperial romance within global circuits of reading and law.
Technologies of speed and communication altered both travel and imagination. The Suez Canal (opened 1869), telegraph networks, and steamship lines like Union‑Castle compressed distance, sustaining Haggard’s plausibility when dispatching characters across oceans. Maxim guns (patented 1884) and railways changed warfare and hunting alike. His stage expands beyond Africa to the Americas and the Indian Ocean: Montezuma’s Daughter and Heart of the World draw on nineteenth‑century histories of the Spanish conquest (William H. Prescott, 1840s), while The Virgin of the Sun returns to Andean ritual and empire. Mary of Marion Isle evokes castaway resilience amid global sea lanes and imperial maritime geographies.
Missionary enterprise—London Missionary Society, Church Missionary Society, Paris Evangelical Missionary Society—threaded through southern and eastern Africa, shaping education, translation, and politics. The figure of the missionary, allied or embattled, recurs against a tapestry of indigenous ritual specialists, prophetic leaders, and Islamic networks on the Swahili coast. Haggard explores religious conflict and syncretism from antiquity to the Crusades: Pearl Maiden stages early Christianity under Roman power; The Wizard, Benita, and The Ghost Kings dramatize contests among competing cosmologies; The Brethren reimagines cross‑faith chivalry. These encounters catalyze debates on conversion, sacrilege, and tolerance within imperial and pre‑imperial pasts.
Gender politics shifted dramatically between the 1880s and 1910s—Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882), the rise of university education for women (Girton, 1869), and suffrage organizations (NUWSS, 1897; WSPU, 1903). Haggard’s fictions feature powerful heroines—Ayesha, Beatrice, Fair Margaret, Lysbeth—who navigate property, reputation, and desire within patriarchal codes. Legal intrigues around inheritance and legitimacy animate plots like Mr. Meeson’s Will and ripple through colonial romances, where marriage may consolidate or imperil alliances. The allure and peril of female authority—queens, priestesses, heiresses—reflect contemporary fascination with the “New Woman” while reinscribing anxieties about charisma, sexuality, and the governance of households and realms.
Beyond romance, Haggard pursued social reform. He investigated rural depopulation and smallholdings, advocating land settlement schemes and studying the Salvation Army’s programs—work summarized in Regeneration (1910) and in related inquiries across Britain and its dominions. A Winter Pilgrimage (1901) shows his travel reportage extending from the Nile to Palestine. These experiences temper his fiction with agrarian ethics—stewardship, enclosure, tenancy—and an eye for the moral economies of village and farm. English‑set works and reflective passages in colonial tales register anxieties about migration from countryside to city, national efficiency after the Boer War, and the viability of yeoman ideals in an industrial age.
War and mourning framed his later career. The First World War (1914–1918) shattered imperial confidence; inflation, bereavement, and the 1918 influenza pandemic darkened horizons. Haggard’s Red Eve reimagines the Black Death of 1348–49 as an apocalyptic mirror, while When the World Shook (1919) turns catastrophe into cosmic parable; Love Eternal (1918) dwells on loss and survival. He died on 14 May 1925, with Days of My Life appearing posthumously in 1926. Film adaptations—She (1925), King Solomon’s Mines (1937, 1950)—extended his reach. Across seven decades of upheaval, his romances distilled the ambitions and doubts of an empire seeking both treasure and meaning.
Synopsis (Selection)
Marie: An Episode in the Life of the Late Allan Quatermain
Young Allan Quatermain’s first great love unfolds amid Boer–Zulu tensions, where frontier violence and political intrigue shape his future.
Allan's Wife
Quatermain recounts his marriage and trials in the African wilderness, confronting jealousy, witchcraft, and the demands of survival.
Child of Storm
Drawn into Zulu royal succession struggles by the enigmatic Mameena, Quatermain witnesses passion and power plays that push a nation toward war.
Allan Quatermain Short Adventures (A Tale of Three Lions; Maiwa’s Revenge; The Hunter Quatermain’s Story; Long Odds; Magepa the Buck)
A set of campfire-length exploits in which Quatermain faces perilous hunts, rescue missions, and moral choices across the veld, emphasizing courage, craft, and frontier justice.
Allan and the Holy Flower
A quest for a legendary orchid leads Quatermain deep into Africa, where slavers, hostile tribes, and a fanatical cult threaten his party.
Heu-Heu
Quatermain encounters a remote people ruled by fear of a monstrous deity, testing his wits against superstition and a brutal regime.
She and Allan
Seeking proof of an afterlife, Quatermain journeys to Kôr and meets Ayesha, whose immortality and insight challenge his beliefs and resolve.
The Treasure of the Lake
Rumors of a hidden lake and sacred hoard draw Quatermain into a secluded land governed by prophecy and a secretive priesthood.
The Ivory Child
Charged with breaking a tribal curse, Quatermain confronts an elephant-god cult, rival peoples, and a fateful prophecy.
Finished
As the Zulu kingdom collapses in the wake of imperial conflicts, Quatermain navigates loyalty and loss to see a turbulent era brought to its close.
King Solomon’s Mines
Quatermain leads an expedition to find a missing man and fabled diamond mines, discovering a hidden African kingdom and deadly politics.
The Ancient Allan
Through visions of a former life in ancient Egypt, Quatermain relives battles and a great love that mirror his own character.
Allan and the Ice-gods
In a dream of prehistoric times, Quatermain re-experiences a primal struggle for survival, migration, and leadership during an age of ice.
Allan Quatermain
Pursuing a lost traveler, Quatermain discovers Zu-Vendis, an isolated kingdom ruled by twin queens, where friendship and political rivalries test the adventurers.
She: A History of Adventure
Scholar Horace Holly and his ward journey to a lost African city and meet Ayesha, an immortal queen whose beauty and power unsettle their world.
Ayesha: The Return of She
Holly and Leo follow occult signs across Asia to a desolate realm, seeking the reappearance of Ayesha and the completion of a perilous destiny.
Wisdom’s Daughter
Ayesha narrates her origins, revealing the sources of her knowledge, her quest for immortality, and the choices that shaped her legend.
Dawn
A Victorian tale of love, inheritance, and social rivalry where legal battles and moral tests decide futures.
The Witch’s Head
A cross-continental romance and revenge story linking English society to African frontiers and the dark pull of obsession.
Jess
Amid the First Boer War, two sisters and a British officer become entangled in love and conflict on the South African frontier.
Mr. Meeson’s Will
A satire turned adventure in which a shipwreck and a will tattooed on skin spark a sensational legal struggle.
Colonel Quaritch, V.C.
A decorated veteran returns to rural England and becomes enmeshed in estate feuds, buried secrets, and an honorable courtship.
Cleopatra
A historical romance where a priest-hero plots against Cleopatra for Egypt’s sake, only to confront passion, fate, and statecraft.
Beatrice
A Victorian romance between a rising barrister and a gifted schoolmistress, shadowed by duty, scandal, and the sea.
The World’s Desire
Odysseus undertakes a final quest for the world’s most coveted beauty, moving through myth, magic, and ancient kingdoms.
Eric Brighteyes
An Icelandic saga of feud and fate, as the warrior Eric battles rivals and sorcery for honor and love.
Nada the Lily
In Zulu lands, the counselor Mopo recounts the rise of Chaka and the tragic love of Nada and Umslopogaas amid war and witchcraft.
Montezuma's Daughter
A tale of vengeance and discovery as a Spaniard in the New World becomes enmeshed with Aztec royalty and the empire’s fall.
The People of the Mist
Seeking fortune to reclaim his estate, an adventurer enters a hidden African nation ruled by ritual, perilous trials, and a serpent cult.
Heart of the World
An expedition into Central America uncovers a secret Mayan city, forcing choices between treasure, duty, and love.
Joan Haste
A realistic domestic tragedy where class, reputation, and constrained choices define the fate of two lovers.
The Wizard
A missionary venture into a warlike African tribe becomes a struggle with a formidable witch-doctor, testing faith, courage, and justice.
Doctor Therne
A cautionary novel of public health and politics, exposing the dangers of anti-vaccination zeal through one doctor’s career.
Elissa; Or, The Doom of Zimbabwe
A romanticized precolonial saga of siege and sacrifice in a fabled African city, where love defies a doomed fate.
Swallow: A Tale of the Great Trek
Romance and endurance mark a party’s journey during the Boer Great Trek, facing warfare, wilderness, and divided loyalties.
Lysbeth
Set amid the Dutch revolt, a young woman and her steadfast lover defy Spanish oppression, inquisitorial peril, and betrayal.
Pearl Maiden
After the fall of Jerusalem, a Christian orphan navigates Roman power and Jewish suffering, her purity and faith drawing fervent suitors.
Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies
A mystical love story of duty versus passion, weaving invention, spiritualism, and moral choice.
The Brethren
During the Crusades, twin knights vie for a kinswoman’s hand and clash with Saladin, balancing chivalry with realpolitik.
The Way of the Spirit
A novel of renunciation and vision in which love, loss, and the lure of mysticism shape human purpose.
Benita
A haunted treasure-hunt on the Zambezi entangles Benita Clifford with possession, siege, and the shadows of the past.
Fair Margaret
In Tudor times, perilous voyages and the Spanish Inquisition test a courageous Englishwoman and the man who loves her.
The Ghost Kings
Witchcraft, prophecy, and tribal politics draw a British woman into alliance with a Zulu seeress and the mysterious Ghost People.
The Yellow God
In West Africa, a golden idol and a web of speculation expose greed, cultural collision, and spiritual peril.
The Lady of Blossholme
Tudor-era intrigue pits an heiress against monastic tyranny and legal chicanery as she fights to reclaim her rights.
Morning Star
In ancient Egypt, the destined princess Tua and her beloved face court conspiracies, magic, and trials of kingship.
Queen Sheba’s Ring
Adventurers aid a hidden African Christian kingdom against a mountain stronghold of foes, guided by an ancient token.
Red Eve
Against the backdrop of the Black Death and early Hundred Years’ War, prophecy and plague test lovers and loyalties.
The Mahatma and the Hare
A gentle fable in which a mystic leads a despondent man—and a hunted hare—toward compassion and consolation.
The Wanderer’s Necklace
A Norse hero’s talisman binds his fate from Viking homelands to the intrigues of Byzantium and beyond.
Love Eternal
A spiritual romance of soul-mates sundered by circumstance, meditating on destiny, grief, and reunion.
Moon of Israel
The Exodus retold from Egypt’s side, blending court drama, romance, and the spectacle of plagues.
When the World Shook
Three explorers awaken an immortal power on a Pacific isle, prompting debates on life, death, and the use of cataclysmic force.
The Virgin of the Sun
A medieval Englishman reaches Inca Peru, where love and ritual collide under the stern gaze of the Sun.
Queen of the Dawn
A Pharaonic romance of a visionary queen whose reign is contested by priests, pretenders, and the weight of prophecy.
Mary of Marion Isle
A modern castaway story where isolation, resourcefulness, and quiet devotion shape two lives on a remote island.
Belshazzar
The fall of Babylon unfolds through palace intrigue and a star-crossed love as Medo-Persian forces close in.
Short Stories (Smith and the Pharaohs; The Blue Curtains; Little Flower; Only a Dream; Barbara Who Came Back)
Brief tales blending romance with the supernatural—dream-visions, hauntings, and encounters with antiquity—often ending with moral reflection or eerie ambiguity.
Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - The Last Boer War
An on-the-ground study of Zulu, Boer, and British relations, critiquing colonial policy and recounting conflicts around Cetshwayo and the First Boer War.
A Winter Pilgrimage
Travel impressions from Egypt and the Near East, mixing archaeology, history, and contemporary observation.
Regeneration
A survey of social reform with the Salvation Army’s schemes at its core, advocating practical remedies for poverty and unemployment.
Days of My Life
Haggard’s memoir chronicles his South African service, literary career, and travels, revealing sources of his themes and characters.
Complete Works of Henry Rider Haggard: 70+ Works In One Volume (Allan Quatermain Series, Ayesha Series, Lost World Novels, Short Stories, Essays & Autobiography)
Allan Quatermain Series:
Marie: An Episode in the Life of the Late Allan Quatermain
CHAPTER I. ALLAN LEARNS FRENCH
Although in my old age I, Allan Quatermain, have taken to writing—after a fashion—never yet have I set down a single word of the tale of my first love and of the adventures that are grouped around her beautiful and tragic history. I suppose this is because it has always seemed to me too holy and far-off a matter—as holy and far-off as is that heaven which holds the splendid spirit of Marie Marais. But now, in my age, that which was far-off draws near again; and at night, in the depths between the stars, sometimes I seem to see the opening doors through which I must pass, and leaning earthwards across their threshold, with outstretched arms and dark and dewy eyes, a shadow long forgotten by all save me—the shadow of Marie Marais.
An old man's dream, doubtless, no more. Still, I will try to set down that history which ended in so great a sacrifice, and one so worthy of record, though I hope that no human eye will read it until I also am forgotten, or, at any rate, have grown dim in the gathering mists of oblivion. And I am glad that I have waited to make this attempt, for it seems to me that only of late have I come to understand and appreciate at its true value the character of her of whom I tell, and the passionate affection which was her bounteous offering to one so utterly unworthy as myself. What have I done, I wonder, that to me should have been decreed the love of two such women as Marie and that of Stella, also now long dead, to whom alone in the world I told all her tale? I remember I feared lest she should take it ill, but this was not so. Indeed, during our brief married days, she thought and talked much of Marie, and some of her last words to me were that she was going to seek her, and that they would wait for me together in the land of love, pure and immortal.
So with Stella's death all that side of life came to an end for me, since during the long years which stretch between then and now I have never said another tender word to woman. I admit, however, that once, long afterwards, a certain little witch of a Zulu did say tender words to me, and for an hour or so almost turned my head, an art in which she had great skill. This I say because I wish to be quite honest, although it—I mean my head, for there was no heart involved in the matter—came straight again at once. Her name was Mameena, and I have set down her remarkable story elsewhere.
To return. As I have already written in another book, I passed my youth with my old father, a Church of England clergyman, in what is now the Cradock district of the Cape Colony.
Then it was a wild place enough, with a very small white population. Among our few neighbours was a Boer farmer of the name of Henri Marais, who lived about fifteen miles from our station, on a fine farm called Maraisfontein. I say he was a Boer, but, as may be guessed from both his Christian and surname, his origin was Huguenot, his forefather, who was also named Henri Marais—though I think the Marais was spelt rather differently then—having been one of the first of that faith who emigrated to South Africa to escape the cruelties of Louis XIV. at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Unlike most Boers of similar descent, these particular Marais—for, of course, there are many other families so called—never forgot their origin. Indeed, from father to son, they kept up some knowledge of the French tongue, and among themselves often spoke it after a fashion. At any rate, it was the habit of Henri Marais, who was excessively religious, to read his chapter of the Bible (which it is, or was, the custom of the Boers to spell out every morning, should their learning allow them to do so), not in the "taal" or patois Dutch, but in good old French. I have the very book from which he used to read now, for, curiously enough, in after years, when all these events had long been gathered to the past, I chanced to buy it among a parcel of other works at the weekly auction of odds and ends on the market square of Maritzburg. I remember that when I opened the great tome, bound over the original leather boards in buckskin, and discovered to whom it had belonged, I burst into tears. There was no doubt about it, for, as was customary in old days, this Bible had sundry fly-leaves sewn up with it for the purpose of the recording of events important to its owner.
The first entries were made by the original Henri Marais, and record how he and his compatriots were driven from France, his father having lost his life in the religious persecutions. After this comes a long list of births, marriages and deaths continued from generation to generation, and amongst them a few notes telling of such matters as the change of the dwelling-places of the family, always in French. Towards the end of the list appears the entry of the birth of the Henri Marais whom I knew, alas! too well, and of his only sister. Then is written his marriage to Marie Labuschagne, also, be it noted, of the Huguenot stock. In the next year follows the birth of Marie Marais, my Marie, and, after a long interval, for no other children were born, the death of her mother. Immediately below appears the following curious passage:
"Le 3 Janvier, 1836. Je quitte ce pays voulant me sauver du maudit gouvernement Britannique comme mes ancêtres se sont sauvés de ce diable—Louis XIV.
"A bas les rois et les ministres tyrannique! Vive la liberté!"
Which indicates very clearly the character and the opinions of Henri Marais, and the feeling among the trek-Boers at that time.
Thus the record closes and the story of the Marais ends—that is, so far as the writings in the Bible go, for that branch of the family is now extinct.
Their last chapter I will tell in due course.
There was nothing remarkable about my introduction to Marie Marais. I did not rescue her from any attack of a wild beast or pull her out of a raging river in a fashion suited to romance. Indeed, we interchanged our young ideas across a small and extremely massive table, which, in fact, had once done duty as a block for the chopping up of meat. To this hour I can see the hundreds of lines running criss-cross upon its surface, especially those opposite to where I used to sit.
One day, several years after my father had emigrated to the Cape, the Heer Marais arrived at our house in search, I think, of some lost oxen. He was a thin, bearded man with rather wild, dark eyes set close together, and a quick nervous manner, not in the least like that of a Dutch Boer—or so I recall him. My father received him courteously and asked him to stop to dine, which he did.
They talked together in French, a tongue that my father knew well, although he had not used it for years; Dutch he could not, or, rather, would not, speak if he could help it, and Mr. Marais preferred not to talk English. To meet someone who could converse in French delighted him, and although his version of the language was that of two centuries before and my father's was largely derived from reading, they got on very well together, if not too fast.
At length, after a pause, Mr. Marais, pointing to myself, a small and stubbly-haired youth with a sharp nose, asked my father whether he would like me to be instructed in the French tongue. The answer was that nothing would please him better.
"Although," he added severely, "to judge by my own experience where Latin and Greek are concerned, I doubt his capacity to learn anything."
So an arrangement was made that I should go over for two days in each week to Maraisfontein, sleeping there on the intervening night, and acquire a knowledge of the French tongue from a tutor whom Mr. Marais had hired to instruct his daughter in that language and other subjects. I remember that my father agreed to pay a certain proportion of this tutor's salary, a plan which suited the thrifty Boer very well indeed.
Thither, accordingly, I went in due course, nothing loth, for on the veld between our station and Maraisfontein many pauw and koran—that is, big and small bustards—were to be found, to say nothing of occasional buck, and I was allowed to carry a gun, which even in those days I could use fairly well. So to Maraisfontein I rode on the appointed day, attended by a Hottentot after-rider, a certain Hans, of whom I shall have a good deal to tell. I enjoyed very good sport on the road, arriving at the stead laden with one pauw, two koran, and a little klipspringer buck which I had been lucky enough to shoot as it bounded out of some rocks in front of me.
There was a peach orchard planted round Maraisfontein, which just then was a mass of lovely pink blossom, and as I rode through it slowly, not being sure of my way to the house, a lanky child appeared in front of me, clad in a frock which exactly matched the colour of the peach bloom. I can see her now, her dark hair hanging down her back, and her big, shy eyes staring at me from the shadow of the Dutch "kappie" which she wore. Indeed, she seemed to be all eyes, like a "dikkop" or thick-headed plover; at any rate, I noted little else about her.
I pulled up my pony and stared at her, feeling very shy and not knowing what to say. For a while she stared back at me, being afflicted, presumably, with the same complaint, then spoke with an effort, in a voice that was very soft and pleasant.
"Are you the little Allan Quatermain who is coming to learn French with me?" she asked in Dutch.
"Of course," I answered in the same tongue, which I knew well; "but why do you call me little, missie? I am taller than you," I added indignantly, for when I was young my lack of height was always a sore point with me.
"I think not," she replied. "But get off that horse, and we will measure here against this wall."
So I dismounted, and, having assured herself that I had no heels to my boots (I was wearing the kind of raw-hide slippers that the Boers call "veld-shoon"), she took the writing slate which she was carrying—it had no frame, I remember, being, in fact, but a piece of the material used for roofing—and, pressing it down tight on my stubbly hair, which stuck up then as now, made a deep mark in the soft sandstone of the wall with the hard pointed pencil.
"There," she said, "that is justly done. Now, little Allan, it is your turn to measure me."
So I measured her, and, behold! she was the taller by a whole half-inch.
"You are standing on tiptoe," I said in my vexation.
"Little Allan," she replied, "to stand on tiptoe would be to lie before the good Lord, and when you come to know me better you will learn that, though I have a dreadful temper and many other sins, I do not lie."
I suppose that I looked snubbed and mortified, for she went on in her grave, grown-up way: "Why are you angry because God made me taller than you? especially as I am whole months older, for my father told me so. Come, let us write our names against these marks, so that in a year or two you may see how you outgrow me." Then with the slate pencil she scratched "Marie" against her mark very deeply, so that it might last, she said; after which I wrote "Allan" against mine.
Alas! Within the last dozen years chance took me past Maraisfontein once more. The house had long been rebuilt, but this particular wall yet stood. I rode to it and looked, and there faintly could still be seen the name Marie, against the little line, and by it the mark that I had made. My own name and with it subsequent measurements were gone, for in the intervening forty years or so the sandstone had flaked away in places. Only her autograph remained, and when I saw it I think that I felt even worse than I did on finding whose was the old Bible that I had bought upon the market square at Maritzburg.
I know that I rode away hurriedly without even stopping to inquire into whose hands the farm had passed. Through the peach orchard I rode, where the trees—perhaps the same, perhaps others—were once more in bloom, for the season of the year was that when Marie and I first met, nor did I draw rein for half a score of miles.
But here I may state that Marie always stayed just half an inch the taller in body, and how much taller in mind and spirit I cannot tell.
When we had finished our measuring match Marie turned to lead me to the house, and, pretending to observe for the first time the beautiful bustard and the two koran hanging from my saddle, also the klipspringer buck that Hans the Hottentot carried behind him on his horse, asked:
"Did you shoot all these, Allan Quatermain?"
"Yes," I answered proudly; "I killed them in four shots, and the pauw and koran were flying, not sitting, which is more than you could have done, although you are taller, Miss Marie."
"I do not know," she answered reflectively. "I can shoot very well with a rifle, for my father has taught me, but I never would shoot at living things unless I must because I was hungry, for I think that to kill is cruel. But, of course, it is different with men," she added hastily, "and no doubt you will be a great hunter one day, Allan Quatermain, since you can already aim so well."
"I hope so," I answered, blushing at the compliment, "for I love hunting, and when there are so many wild things it does not matter if we kill a few. I shot these for you and your father to eat."
"Come, then, and give them to him. He will thank you," and she led the way through the gate in the sandstone wall into the yard, where the outbuildings stood in which the riding horses and the best of the breeding cattle were kept at night, and so past the end of the long, one-storied house, that was stone-built and whitewashed, to the stoep or veranda in front of it.
On the broad stoep, which commanded a pleasant view over rolling, park-like country, where mimosa and other trees grew in clumps, two men were seated, drinking strong coffee, although it was not yet ten o'clock in the morning.
Hearing the sound of the horses, one of these, Mynheer Marais, whom I already knew, rose from his hide-strung chair. He was, as I think I have said, not in the least like one of the phlegmatic Boers, either in person or in temperament, but, rather, a typical Frenchman, although no member of his race had set foot in France for a hundred and fifty years. At least so I discovered afterwards, for, of course, in those days I knew nothing of Frenchmen.
His companion was also French, Leblanc by name, but of a very different stamp. In person he was short and stout. His large head was bald except for a fringe of curling, iron-grey hair which grew round it just above the ears and fell upon his shoulders, giving him the appearance of a tonsured but dishevelled priest. His eyes were blue and watery, his mouth was rather weak, and his cheeks were pale, full and flabby. When the Heer Marais rose, I, being an observant youth, noted that Monsieur Leblanc took the opportunity to stretch out a rather shaky hand and fill up his coffee cup out of a black bottle, which from the smell I judged to contain peach brandy.
In fact, it may as well be said at once that the poor man was a drunkard, which explains how he, with all his high education and great ability, came to hold the humble post of tutor on a remote Boer farm. Years before, when under the influence of drink, he had committed some crime in France—I don't know what it was, and never inquired—and fled to the Cape to avoid prosecution. Here he obtained a professorship at one of the colleges, but after a while appeared in the lecture-room quite drunk and lost his employment. The same thing happened in other towns, till at last he drifted to distant Maraisfontein, where his employer tolerated his weakness for the sake of the intellectual companionship for which something in his own nature seemed to crave. Also, he looked upon him as a compatriot in distress, and a great bond of union between them was their mutual and virulent hatred of England and the English, which in the case of Monsieur Leblanc, who in his youth had fought at Waterloo and been acquainted with the great Emperor, was not altogether unnatural.
Henri Marais's case was different, but of that I shall have more to say later.
"Ah, Marie," said her father, speaking in Dutch, "so you have found him at last," and he nodded towards me, adding: "You should be flattered, little man. Look you, this missie has been sitting for two hours in the sun waiting for you, although I told her you would not arrive much before ten o'clock, as your father the prédicant said you would breakfast before you started. Well, it is natural, for she is lonely here, and you are of an age, although of a different race"; and his face darkened as he spoke the words.
"Father," answered Marie, whose blushes I could see even in the shadow of her cap, "I was not sitting in the sun, but under the shade of a peach tree. Also, I was working out the sums that Monsieur Leblanc set me on my slate. See, here they are," and she held up the slate, which was covered with figures, somewhat smudged, it is true, by the rubbing of my stiff hair and of her cap.
Then Monsieur Leblanc broke in, speaking in French, of which, as it chanced I understood the sense, for my father had grounded me in that tongue, and I am naturally quick at modern languages. At any rate, I made out that he was asking if I was the little "cochon d'anglais," or English pig, whom for his sins he had to teach. He added that he judged I must be, as my hair stuck up on my head—I had taken off my hat out of politeness—as it naturally would do on a pig's back.
This was too much for me, so, before either of the others could speak, I answered in Dutch, for rage made me eloquent and bold:
"Yes, I am he; but, mynheer, if you are to be my master, I hope you will not call the English pigs any more to me."
"Indeed, gamin" (that is, little scamp), "and pray, what will happen if I am so bold as to repeat that truth?"
"I think, mynheer," I replied, growing white with rage at this new insult, "the same that has happened to yonder buck," and I pointed to the klipspringer behind Hans's saddle. "I mean that I shall shoot you."
"Peste! Au moins il a du courage, cet enfant" (At least the child is plucky), exclaimed Monsieur Leblanc, astonished. From that moment, I may add, he respected me, and never again insulted my country to my face.
Then Marais broke out, speaking in Dutch that I might understand:
"It is you who should be called pig, Leblanc, not this boy, for, early as it is, you have been drinking. Look! the brandy bottle is half empty. Is that the example you set to the young? Speak so again and I turn you out to starve on the veld. Allan Quatermain, although, as you may have heard, I do not like the English, I beg your pardon. I hope you will forgive the words this sot spoke, thinking that you did not understand," and he took off his hat and bowed to me quite in a grand manner, as his ancestors might have done to a king of France.
Leblanc's face fell. Then he rose and walked away rather unsteadily; as I learned afterwards, to plunge his head in a tub of cold water and swallow a pint of new milk, which were his favourite antidotes after too much strong drink. At any rate, when he appeared again, half an hour later, to begin our lesson, he was quite sober, and extremely polite.
When he had gone, my childish anger being appeased, I presented the Heer Marais with my father's compliments, also with the buck and the birds, whereof the latter seemed to please him more than the former. Then my saddle-bags were taken to my room, a little cupboard of a place next to that occupied by Monsieur Leblanc, and Hans was sent to turn the horses out with the others belonging to the farm, having first knee-haltered them tightly, so that they should not run away home.
This done, the Heer Marais showed me the room in which we were to have our lessons, one of the "sitkammer", or sitting chambers, whereof, unlike most Boer stead, this house boasted two. I remember that the floor was made of "daga", that is, ant-heap earth mixed with cow-dung, into which thousands of peach-stones had been thrown while it was still soft, in order to resist footwear—a rude but fairly efficient expedient, and one not unpleasing to the eye. For the rest, there was one window opening on to the veranda, which, in that bright climate, admitted a shaded but sufficient light, especially as it always stood open; the ceiling was of unplastered reeds; a large bookcase stood in the corner containing many French works, most of them the property of Monsieur Leblanc, and in the centre of the room was the strong, rough table made of native yellow-wood, that once had served as a butcher's block. I recollect also a coloured print of the great Napoleon commanding at some battle in which he was victorious, seated upon a white horse and waving a field-marshal's baton over piles of dead and wounded; and near the window, hanging to the reeds of the ceiling, the nest of a pair of red-tailed swallows, pretty creatures that, notwithstanding the mess they made, afforded to Marie and me endless amusement in the intervals of our work.
When, on that day, I shuffled shyly into this homely place, and, thinking myself alone there, fell to examining it, suddenly I was brought to a standstill by a curious choking sound which seemed to proceed from the shadows behind the bookcase. Wondering as to its cause, I advanced cautiously to discover a pink-clad shape standing in the corner like a naughty child, with her head resting against the wall, and sobbing slowly.
"Marie Marais, why do you cry?" I asked.
She turned, tossing back the locks of long, black hair which hung about her face, and answered:
"Allan Quatermain, I cry because of the shame which has been put upon you and upon our house by that drunken Frenchman."
"What of that?" I asked. "He only called me a pig, but I think I have shown him that even a pig has tusks."
"Yes," she replied, "but it was not you he meant; it was all the English, whom he hates; and the worst of it is that my father is of his mind. He, too, hates the English, and, oh! I am sure that trouble will come of his hatred, trouble and death to many."
"Well, if so, we have nothing to do with it, have we?" I replied with the cheerfulness of extreme youth.
"What makes you so sure?" she said solemnly. "Hush! here comes Monsieur Leblanc."
CHAPTER II. THE ATTACK ON MARAISFONTEIN
I do not propose to set out the history of the years which I spent in acquiring a knowledge of French and various other subjects, under the tuition of the learned but prejudiced Monsieur Leblanc. Indeed, there is "none to tell, sir." When Monsieur Leblanc was sober, he was a most excellent and well-informed tutor, although one apt to digress into many side issues, which in themselves were not uninstructive. When tipsy, he grew excited and harangued us, generally upon politics and religion, or rather its reverse, for he was an advanced freethinker, although this was a side to his character which, however intoxicated he might be, he always managed to conceal from the Heer Marais. I may add that a certain childish code of honour prevented us from betraying his views on this and sundry other matters. When absolutely drunk, which, on an average, was not more than once a month, he simply slept, and we did what we pleased—a fact which our childish code of honour also prevented us from betraying.
