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[Cd. 2562] Political History CETEWAYO AND HIS WHITE NEIGHBOURS Works on Agriculture, Country Life, and Sociology RURAL ENGLAND (2 vols ) A GARDENER’S YEAR THE POOR AND THE LAND RURALEDENMARK. AND ITS A FARMER’S YEAR LESSONS Book of Travel A WINTER PILGRIMAGE Novels DAWN JOAN HASTE THE WITCH’S HEAD DOCTOR THERNE JESS STELLA FREGELIUS COLONEL QUARITCH, V. C. THE IVAY OF THE SPIRIT BEATRICE LOVE ETERNAL • Romances KING SOLOMON’S MINES THE YELLOW GOD: AN IDOL SHE OF AFRICA ALLAN QUATERMAIN MORNING STAR MAIWA’S REVENGE THE LADY OF BLOSSHOLME MR. MEESON’S WILL QUEEN SHEBA’S RING ALLAN’S WIFE RED EVE CLEOPATRA THE MAHATMA AND THE ERIC BRIGHTEYES HARE NADA THE LILY MARIE MONTEZUMA’S DAUGHTER CHILD OF STORM THE PEOPLE OF THE MIST THE WANDERER’S NECK¬ HEART OF THE WORLD LACE SWALLOW THE HOLY FLOWER BLACK HEART AND WHITE THE IVORY CHILD HEART FINISHED LYSBETH PEARL MAIDEN WHEN THE WORLD SHOOK THE BRETHREN MOON OF ISRAEL AYESHA: THE RETURN OF THE ANCIENT ALLAN SHE SMITH AND THE PHARAOHS, BENITA AND OTHER TALES FAIR MARGARET SHE AND ALLAN THE GHOST KINGS THE VIRGIN OF THE SUN (In collaboration with Andrew Lang) THE WORLD’S DESIRE Wisdom’s Daughter !The Life and Love Story of She- Who-TMiust-be- Obeyed / ' By H. Rider Haggard Garden City New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1923 o COPYRIGHT, I923, fiY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY / ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LITE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. First Edition APR 12 *23 P- C1A698059 y In bygone years the books “ She ” and “Ayesha ” were dedicated to Andrew Lang. Now,when he is dead, this, the last romance that will be written concerning “ She-Who-Must- Be-Obeyedis offered as a tribute to his beloved and honoured memory. Ditchingham, 1922. EDITOR’S NOTE What was the greatest fault of Ayesha, She-JVho- Must-B e-Ob eyed? Surely a vanity so colossal that, to take one out of many examples, it persuaded her that her mother died after looking upon her, fearing lest, should she live, she might give birth to another child who was less fair. At least, as her story shows, it was vanity, rather than love of the beauteous Greek, Kallikrates, that stained the hands of She with his innocent blood and, amongst other ills, brought upon her the fearful curse of deathlessness while still inhabiting a sphere where Death is lord of all. Had not Amenartas taunted her with the waning of her imperial beauty, eaten of the tooth of Time, never would she have disobeyed the command of her master, the Prophet Noot, and entered that Fire of Immortality which she was set to guard. Thus it seems that by denial she would have escaped the net of many woes in which, perchance, she is still entangled and of Ayesha, Daughter of Wisdom yet Folly’s Slave, there would have been no tale to tell and, from her parable of the eternal war of flesh and spirit there would have been no lesson to be learned. But Vanity—or was it Fate?—led her down another road. The Editor. Vll CONTENTS PAGE Introductory. xi CHAPTER I. The Halls of Heaven . i II. Noot the Prophet Comes to Ozal . 13 III. The Battle and the Flight ... .28 IV. The Kiss of Fate .40 V. The Summons.54 VI. The Divination.67 VII. The Quelling of the Storm .... 85 VIII. The King of Sidon.99 IX. Dagon Takes His Sacrifice 115 X. The Vengeance of Beltis.129 XI. The Escape from Sidon.149 XII. The Sea Battle.164 XIII. The Shame of Pharaoh.182 XIV. The Beguiling of Bagoas .202 XV. The Plot and the Voice.219 XVI. The Feast of the King of Kings . 234 XVII. The Flight and the Summons . 247 ix X CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XVIII. The Tale of Philo.264 XIX. The Hermitage of Noot.278 XX. The Coming of Kallikrates .... 295 XXI. The Truth and the Temptation . 312 XXII. Beware! .326 XXIII. The Doom of the Fire.340 XXIV. The Counsel of Philo.353 XXV. In Undying Loneliness.371 WISDOM’S DAUGHTER INTRODUCTORY The manuscript of which the contents are printed here was discovered among the effects of the late L. Horace Holly, though not until some years after his death. It was in an envelope on which had been scribbled a direction that it should be forwarded to the present editor “at the appointed time,,} words that at first he did not understand. How¬ ever, in due course it arrived without any accompany¬ ing note of explanation, so that to this hour he does not know by whom it was sent or where from, since the only postmark on the packet was London, IV., and the address was typewritten. IVhen opened the package proved to contain two thick notebooks, bound in parchment, or rather scraped goat or sheepskin, and very roughly as though by an unskilled hand, perhaps in order to preserve them if exposed to hard usage or weather. The paper of these books is extremely thin and tough so that each of them contains a great number of sheets. It is not of European make, and its ap¬ pearance suggests that it was manufactured in the East, perhaps in China. There could be no doubt as to who had owned these notebooks, because on one of them, the first, written in red ink upon the parchment cover in block letters, appears the name of Mr. Holly himself. Also on its first pages are various memo¬ randa of travel evidently made by him and no one else. After these follow sheet upon sheet of ap- INTRODUCTORY parently indecipherable shorthand mixed up with tiny Arabic characters. This shorthand proved to belong to no known system, and although every effort was made to decipher it, for over two years it remained unread. At length, when all attempts had been abandoned, almost by chance, it was shown to a great Oriental scholar, a friend of the Editor, who glanced at it and took it to bed with him. Next morning at breakfast he announced calmly that he had dis¬ covered the key and could read the stuff as easily as though it were a newspaper leader. It seemed that the writing was an ancient forjn of contracted Arabic, mixed in places with the Demotic of the Egyptians—a shorthand Arabic and a shorthand Demotic, difficult at first, but once the key was found easily decipherable by some six or eight living men, of whom, as it chanced, the learned scholar into whose hands it had thus fallen accidentally was one. So it came about that with toil and cost and time, at length those two closely written volumes were transcribed in full and translated.