Henry Rider Haggard

Full text. The story: set in the Ptolemaic era of Ancient Egyptian history and revolves around the survival of a dynasty bloodline protected by the Priesthood of Isis. The main character Harmachis (the living descendant of the pharaoh's bloodline) is charged by the Priesthood to overthrow the supposed impostor Cleopatra, drive out the Greeks and Romans and restore Egypt to its golden era. By the author of King Solomon's Mines and She. Quote: "And thus Woman rules the world. For her are wars; for her men spend their strength in gathering gains; for her they do well and ill, and seek for greatness, to find oblivion. But still she sits like yonder Sphinx, and smiles; and no man has ever read all the riddle of her smile, or known all the mystery of her heart. Mock not mock not Harmachis; for he must be great indeed who can defy the power of Woman, which, pressing round him like the invisible air, is often strongest when the senses least discover it."

Nearly twenty years have passed since their first adventure in Africa, but he and his ward Leo Vincey are convinced that Ayesha did not die. Following their dreams, they wander for years through Asia. Taking refuge over winter in a remote lamasery, they meet the old Abbot Kou-En, who claims to recall a past-life encounter tales with a witch queen from the time of Alexander the Great.

Benita is a strong woman born in Africa, raised in England, who is returning to Africa to be with her father. She falls in love with Robert on the long steamer voyage, and is about to say yes to his proposal when the ship hits a rock .

Henry Rider Haggard was born at Bradenham, Norfolk, to Sir William Meybohm Rider Haggard, a barrister, and Ella Doveton, an author and poet. He was the eighth of ten children. He was initially sent to Garsington Rectory in Oxfordshire to study under the Reverend H. J. Graham but, unlike his older brothers who graduated from various Public Schools, he ended up attending Ipswich Grammar School.

Before the beginning of this story of the most remarkable episodes in his life, Philip Hadden was engaged for several years in transport-riding--carrying goods on ox waggons from Durban or Maritzburg to various points in the interior of Africa.

An adventurous trader, it is said, hearing the legend of a great treasure buried a party of Portuguese hundreds of years before, as a last resource attempted its discovery by the help of a mesmerist. A child was put into a trance, and gave his mesmerist details of the adventures and death of the unhappy Portuguese men and women.

Before the beginning of this story of the most remarkable episodes in his life, Philip Hadden was engaged for several years in transport-riding--carrying goods on ox waggons from Durban or Maritzburg to various points in the interior of Africa. On arriving at the little frontier town of Utrecht in the Transvaal.

"You lie; you always were a liar, and you always will be a liar. You told my father how I spent the money." "Well, and what if I did? I had to look after myself, I suppose. You forget that I am only here on sufferance, whilst you are the son of the house. It does not matter to you, but he would have turned me out of doors," whined George. "Oh curse your fine words; it's you who forget, you swab. Ay, it's you who forget that you asked me to take the money to the gambling- tent, and made me promise that you should have half of what we won, but that I should play for both.

Madam, You have graciously conveyed to me the intelligence that during the weary weeks spent far from his home-in alternate hope and fear, in suffering and mortal trial-a Prince whose memory all men must reverence, the Emperor Frederick, found pleasure in the reading of my stories: that "they interested and fascinated him.

My dear Mother, I have for a long while hoped to be allowed to dedicate some book of mine to you, and now I bring you this work, because whatever its shortcomings, and whatever judgment may be passed upon it by yourself and others, it is yet the one I should wish you to accept. I trust that you will receive from my romance of "Cleopatra" some such pleasure as lightened the labour of its building up; and that it may convey to your mind a picture, however imperfect, of the old and mysterious Egypt in whose lost glories you are so deeply interested. Your affectionate and dutiful Son, H. Rider Haggard. January 21, 1889.

At the date of our introduction to him, Philip Hadden was a transport- rider and trader in "the Zulu." Still on the right side of forty, in appearance he was singularly handsome; tall, dark, upright, with keen eyes, short-pointed beard, curling hair and clear-cut features. His life had been varied, and there were passages in it which he did not narrate even to his most intimate friends. He was of gentle birth, however, and it was said that he had received a public school and university education in England. At any rate he could quote the classics with aptitude on occasion, an accomplishment which, coupled with his refined voice and a bearing not altogether common in the wild places of the world, had earned for him among his rough companions the soubriquet of "The Prince.

Alone and desolate, within hearing of the thunder of the waters of the North Sea, but not upon them, stand the ruins of Ramborough Abbey. Once there was a city at their feet, now the city has gone; nothing is left of its greatness save the stone skeleton of the fabric of the Abbey above and the skeletons of the men who built it mouldering in the earth below. To the east, across a waste of uncultivated heath, lies the wide ocean; and, following the trend of the coast northward, the eye falls upon the red roofs of the fishing village of Bradmouth. When Ramborough was a town, this village was a great port; but the sea, advancing remorselessly, has choked its harbour and swallowed up the ancient borough which to-day lies beneath the waters. With that of Ramborough the glory of Bradmouth is departed, and of its priory and churches there remains but one lovely and dilapidated fane, the largest perhaps in the east of England-that of Yarmouth alone excepted-and, as many think, the most beautiful. At the back of Bradmouth church, which, standing upon a knoll at some distance from the cliff, has escaped the fate of the city that once nestled beneath it, stretch rich marsh meadows, ribbed with raised lines of roadway. But these do not make up all the landscape, for between Bradmouth and the ruins of Ramborough, following the indentations of the sea coast and set back in a fold or depression of the ground, lie a chain of small and melancholy meres, whose brackish waters, devoid of sparkle even on the brightest day, are surrounded by coarse and worthless grass land, the haunt of the shore-shooter, and a favourite feeding-place of curlews, gulls, coots and other wild-fowl. Beyond these meres the ground rises rapidly, and is clothed in gorse and bracken, interspersed with patches of heather, till it culminates in the crest of a bank that marks doubtless the boundary of some primeval fiord or lake, where, standing in a ragged line, are groups of wind-torn Scotch fir trees, surrounding a grey and solitary house known as Moor Farm. The dwellers in these parts-that is, those of them who are alive to such matters-think that there are few more beautiful spots than this slope of barren land pitted with sullen meres and bordered by the sea. Indeed, it has attractions in every season: even in winter, when the snow lies in drifts upon the dead fern, and the frost-browned gorse shivers in the east wind leaping on it from the ocean. It is always beautiful, and yet there is truth in the old doggerel verse that is written in a quaint Elizabethan hand upon the fly-lead of one of the Bradmouth parish registers- "Of Rambro', north and west and south, Man's eyes can never see enough; Yet winter's gloom or summer's light, Wide England hath no sadder sight.

York office building, a tall young man in a fur-lined coat stood shivering. Why did he shiver in that coat? He shivered because he was fussed, poor chap. Because he was rattled, from the soles of his custom-made boots to the apex of his Piccadilly hat. A painful, palpitating spectacle, he stood. Meanwhile, on the other side of the door, the business of the American branch of that famous marine insurance firm, Lloyds, of London- usually termed in magazine articles "The Greatest Gambling Institution in the World"-went on oblivious to the shiverer who approached. The shiverer, with a nervous movement, shifted his walking-stick to his left hand, and laid his right on the door-knob. Though he is not at his best, let us take a look at him.