Ayesha

The lamps in the caves are carved funeral vessels, and they burn with a soft, steady light that makes the long passage feel lonelier, not less. At the end of it old Billali drops flat on his face before a heavy curtain, and the air smells of perfume. Nothing moves for minutes. Then a hand comes out between the folds, white as snow, with long tapering fingers, and a voice like a brook over stones asks in pure, old-fashioned Arabic why the stranger is so afraid.

That is how Ayesha enters the world, in the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of She, the romance H. Rider Haggard wrote in a little over six weeks in early 1886. His manuscript is dated as finished on 18 March 1886. It ran as a serial in The Graphic in London and Harper’s Weekly in New York from October 1886 to January 1887, and Longmans published the London book on 1 January 1887. Ayesha is not an inherited myth. She has one author and a date of birth, and Haggard said so himself: in his autobiography, The Days of My Life, he recalled that the only clear idea he had when he sat down to write was “an immortal woman inspired by an immortal love,” and that everything else shaped itself round her.

The book reaches her through a chain of documents. Leo Vincey, a young Englishman raised by his guardian, the Cambridge scholar Horace Holly, opens an iron box on his twenty-fifth birthday and finds a potsherd written in Greek. Its author is Amenartas, a princess of the royal house of the Pharaohs and wife of Kallikrates, a priest of Isis who broke his vows and fled Egypt with her. They were wrecked on the African coast near a rock shaped like an Ethiopian’s head, came to a white queen who knew the secret of a rolling pillar of life, and saw the queen kill Kallikrates in her rage. The sherd charges their son to find the woman and slay her. Leo and Holly sail for Zanzibar, are wrecked beside that same rock, and fall into the hands of the Amahagger, the People of the Rocks, who speak a corrupted Arabic and obey a ruler they call Hiya, or simply She: She-who-must-be-obeyed.

Her own account, given to Holly on a cushioned couch beside a stone basin of water, fills in the rest. She was born an Arab of the Arabs in the city of Ozal in Yaman, of the line of Yarab son of Kahtan. She tried to teach wisdom in Jerusalem and was stoned at the gate of the Temple; she pulls back her sleeve to show the scar, still red against the skin. In Africa she heard of a hermit named Noot, the last wise man of the vanished people of Kor, who had found a fire that was Nature’s own blood and life and who refused to use it, saying man was born to die. She charmed the secret out of him. A few days later she met Kallikrates and Amenartas, fell in love for the first and only time, and led them both down to the fire. Noot lay newly dead. Ayesha stepped into the flame and came out undying. She held out her arms to Kallikrates, and he, blinded by her beauty, turned and embraced Amenartas instead. Ayesha seized his javelin and stabbed him where he stood.

Since then she has waited. By night she goes down into the tombs where his body lies on a stone bier under a white sheet, perfectly preserved. Holly, hiding behind a curtain, watches her curse Amenartas in a hissing voice while a flame rises and falls on the walls, then sink to the rock floor and sob over two thousand years of memory that will not fade. She stretches her hands over the sheet and the shape beneath it seems to stir. Then she lets it go. Any life she put into him, she says, would be her life and not his.

Leo walks into this as the living image of the dead man, golden curls and all. Ayesha has the means to make room for him. Ustane, the Amahagger woman who chose Leo by local custom and refuses to give him up, has already been marked with three finger-prints burned white into her hair. When she defies the queen a second time, Ayesha only raises her arm and looks at her. Ustane screams, turns twice and falls dead. Leo springs at Ayesha and is flung back by the same outstretched hand, and before long he is in her arms, with the body still lying on the floor.

She is clear about what she can and cannot do, and she will not call it magic. There is no such thing, she tells Holly, only knowledge of the secrets of Nature. The basin of water at her side shows her the past and whatever the person gazing into it has known, and in it she watched the strangers arrive. It cannot show her the future. Her medicine drags Leo back from a fever that should have killed him, and her will can stop a heart across a room. Yet she cannot die before her hour comes, and she fears that if she sought Kallikrates beyond death she might lose her way among the stars. Noot had told her that her life was only prolonged and brightened, not made eternal.

The ending is the most famous thing Haggard ever wrote, and he wrote it while killing time in his literary agent A. P. Watt’s office in Paternoster Square. Ayesha leads Leo and Holly through the ruins of Kor, across a black gulf on a rocking spur of stone, and down to a cave where the pillar of fire rolls through with a noise like a forest being flattened by wind. Leo doubts. To show him there is nothing to fear, and to wash the hatred of Amenartas out of her soul, she steps into it a second time. The fire runs up her body; she lifts it in her hands like water, pours it over her head and breathes it in. Then it went wrong. Her face pinches. Her hair falls to the floor. She shrinks, her skin turning brown and creased like old parchment, until she is no bigger than a monkey, blind under a horny film. “Forget me not, Kallikrates,” she says. “I shall come again.” She dies on the spot where she killed him. Holly never learns why the fire turned.

Haggard held her to that promise. In Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), Holly and Leo spend sixteen years searching Central Asia, five of them in Tibet, and find her reborn as the Hesea, priestess of an oracle in a fire-mountain beyond the Tibetan border; Leo dies at her kiss. Haggard returned to her again in later books, among them Wisdom’s Daughter. Carl Jung gave She first place among the novels that portray what he called the anima and named Haggard the classic exponent of the motif, singling out her timelessness. Her weakness was never fire. It was the one man she could neither forget nor forgive herself for killing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ayesha in She?

Ayesha is the immortal queen at the centre of H. Rider Haggard’s novel She, serialized from 1886 to 1887 and published as a book in January 1887. Known as She-who-must-be-obeyed, she rules the Amahagger from the caves of Kor in Africa. She is a literary creation, not a figure from older folklore.

How did Ayesha become immortal?

Ayesha bathed in a rolling pillar of fire deep beneath the ruins of Kor, a secret she learned from a hermit named Noot who refused to use it himself. She stepped into the flame and came out undying. This happened about two thousand years before the events of the novel.

Why did Ayesha kill Kallikrates?

Ayesha killed Kallikrates, a priest of Isis, out of jealousy. When she came out of the fire and offered herself to him, he turned and embraced his wife, the Egyptian princess Amenartas, and Ayesha stabbed him with his own javelin. She then waited two thousand years for him to be reborn, and believes she has found him in Leo Vincey.

How does Ayesha die?

At the end of She, Ayesha enters the pillar of fire a second time to show Leo Vincey it is safe. Instead of renewing her, it ages her instantly: her hair falls out and she shrinks to the size of a monkey before dying, promising Kallikrates that she will come again. Haggard brought her back in the sequel Ayesha: The Return of She (1905).

What does “She-who-must-be-obeyed” mean?

“She-who-must-be-obeyed” is the title the Amahagger give Ayesha in Haggard’s She, often shortened to Hiya or simply She. It reflects the absolute terror in which she rules them, since she can strike people dead with a gesture and a look.

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