Chapter I: Front Matter

David Thomas

Wisdom's Daughter

_The Life and Love Story of She-Who-Must-be-Obeyed_

By H. Rider Haggard

Garden City New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1923

DEDICATION

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-Obeyed_," is offered as a tribute to his beloved and honoured memory.

_Ditchingham_, 1922.

EDITOR'S NOTE

What was the greatest fault of Ayesha, _She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed_? 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.

CONTENTS

Introductory

I. The Halls of Heaven

II. Noot the Prophet Comes to Ozal

III. The Battle and the Flight

IV. The Kiss of Fate

V. The Summons

VI. The Divination

VII. The Quelling of the Storm

VIII. The King of Sidon

IX. Dagon Takes His Sacrifice

X. The Vengeance of Beltis

XI. The Escape from Sidon

XII. The Sea Battle

XIII. The Shame of Pharaoh

XIV. The Beguiling of Bagoas

XV. The Plot and the Voice

XVI. The Feast of the King of Kings

XVII. The Flight and the Summons

XVIII. The Tale of Philo

XIX. The Hermitage of Noot

XX. The Coming of Kallikrates

XXI. The Truth and the Temptation

XXII. Beware!

XXIII. The Doom of the Fire

XXIV. The Counsel of Philo

XXV. In Undying Loneliness

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. However, in due course it arrived without any accompanying 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, W., and the address was typewritten._

_When 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 appearance 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 memoranda of travel evidently made by him and no one else. After these follow sheet upon sheet of apparently 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 discovered the key and could read the stuff as easily as though it were a newspaper leader. It seemed that the writing was an ancient form 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. For the rest, they speak for themselves. Let the reader judge of them._

_There is but one thing to add. Although it is recorded in notebooks that had been his property, clearly this manuscript was_ not _written by Mr. Holly. For reasons which she explains it was written with the hand of_ She _herself, during the period of her second incarnation when at last Leo found her in the mountains of Thibet, as is described in the book called "Ayesha."_