She
1886
She is the story of a queen who has waited two thousand years. Ayesha rules a hidden kingdom in the heart of Africa, immortal and all-powerful, her beauty as terrible as her will. When the Englishman Leo Vincey arrives, drawn by a letter and a legacy, he carries the face of her murdered lover, and she is ready to welcome him home. But what awaits in that ancient place is not romance but something far darker: a woman whose love has curdled into obsession, whose devotion has become a kind of death. Horace Holly, Leo's guardian, watches the catastrophe unfold, helpless before She-who-must-be-obeyed. This is adventure at its most primal, a lost-world tale that invented the genre, but it is also a story about what happens when desire outlives reason, when waiting becomes madness. More than a century later, Ayesha remains one of fiction's most chilling figures.
Editions
X-Ray
“Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.””
— H. Rider Haggard
“The moon went slowly down in loveliness; she departed into the depth of the horizon, and long veil-like shadows crept up the sky through which the stars appeared. Soon, however, they too began to pale before a splendour in the east, and the advent of the dawn declared itself in the newborn blue of heaven. Quieter and yet more quiet grew the sea, quiet as the soft mist that brooded on her bosom, and covered up her troubling, as in our tempestuous life the transitory wreaths of sleep brook upon a pain-racked soul, causing it to forget its sorrow. From the east to the west sped those angels of the Dawn, from sea to sea, from mountain-top to mountain-top, scattering light from breast and wing. On they sped out of the darkness, perfect, glorious; on, over the quiet sea, over the low coast-line, and the swamps beyond, and the mountains above them; over those who slept in peace and those who woke in sorrow; over the evil and the good; over the living and the dead; over the wide world and all that breathes or as breathed thereon.””
— H. Rider Haggard
“Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, 'See, he is a wise man!' Is it not so?””
— H. Rider Haggard
“Thinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought.””
— H. Rider Haggard
“There is no such things as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature.””
— H. Rider Haggard
“Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?””
— H. Rider Haggard
“Memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand--evil have I done, and with sorrow have I made acquaintance from age to age, and from age to age evil shall I do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.””
— H. Rider Haggard
“It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved by timely death from moral petrification, if not from moral corruption.””
— H. Rider Haggard
“And now let us love and take that which is given us, and be happy; for in the grave there is no love and no warmth, nor any touching of the lips. Nothing perchance, or perchance but bitter memories of what might have been.””
— H. Rider Haggard
