The Ivory Child

Leonard Outram, a young Englishman who’s just lost his fortune along with and his fiancee’s hand, makes an oath: he’ll win back his home and live happily ever after. Really! Well, sort of. Leonard ends up in Africa, which, at that point in history, was the place to win your fortune back for the gods of fate. Leonard rescues a maid from a slave-dealer – for a fee, of course! – and then falls in love with her, complicating the heck out of his situation. Oh well: a great adventure ensues, taking them to places no one has ever heard of, then or now – leading to narrow escapes, love, intrigue, and of course, high adventure.

Nada the Lily is the thrilling story of the brave Zulu warrior Umslopogaas and his love for the most beautiful of Zulu women, Nada the Lily. Young Umslopogaas, son of the bloodthirsty Zulu king Chaka, is forced to flee when Chaka orders his death. In the adventures that ensue, Umslopogaas is carried away by a lion and then rescued by Galazi, king of an army of ghost-wolves. Together, Umslopogaas and Galazi fight for glory and honour and to avenge their wrongs. With their fabled weapons, an axe called Groan-Maker and the club Watcher of the Woods, the two men become legendary warriors. But even these two unstoppable heroes may finally have met their match when the Zulu king sends his army of slayers to destroy them! Although he is more famous for his romances King Solomon’s Mines and She, the unjustly neglected Nada the Lily is one of Haggard’s finest achievements. Nada the Lily is a dazzling blend of adventure, romance, fantasy, and the Gothic, brilliantly weaving fiction and history into an unforgettable tale.

The last book published in Haggard’s lifetime is a standalone ancient-Egyptian fantasy. It opens at an almost breakneck pace, with Pharaoh deposed and killed, his wife and child in hiding, and the goddesses stirring. A secret religious order raises the Pharaoh’s daughter, and she meets and falls in love with the usurper’s disguised son. The climax features traditional adventure-fiction excitement (battle and torture).

Treasure and the occult are vividly blended in this stirring tale of Africa. Allan Quatermain finds a village in the middle of the Dark Continent ruled by a huge, pale man with a strange knowledge of future events. This is the last Quatermain book.

In the fourth and final book in the sequence, the beautiful and immortal Ayesha tells her tale of power, wisdom, love, and deception, in her own words. Arabian by birth, Ayesha’s natural beauty was the cause in her father’s kingdom of many wars and conflicts between jealous princes and suitors, leading to a rumor that she was cursed. Swearing an oath of celibacy, to serve Isis the Goddess of the Spirit of Nature and turn away from Aphrodite the Goddess of Love, she seeks to protect herself, until Greek soldier of fortune Kallikrates comes to her for sanctuary and her resolve weakens. But Kallikrates does not arrive alone—he is pursued by the Pharaoh’s daughter who is wildly jealous of Ayesha’s beauty and vows to destroy her. Only by staying true to Isis does Ayesha survive, and as a reward Isis leads her to the hidden kingdom of Kôr in Africa, to herald in a new Golden Age. The kingdom of Kôr hides many secrets, including The Flame of Eternal Life where ultimately Ayesha’s vanity, obsession, and desire lead to her downfall.

Allan Quartermain – our hero – and Ayesha (that is, She Who Must Be Obeyed) share the limelight in this great adventure, but oddly enough considering the stars on stage, it’s Umslopogaas the Zulu who steals the show. A supernatural fantasy thriller featuring a magic token, telepathy, powers of the occult, and a people lost to time in the depths of ancient Africa.

Three Englishmen, marooned on a mysterious South Sea island, learn of the islanders’ powerful god Oro, who has been sleeping for 250,000 years. They manage to wake him, along with his beautiful daughter, who is the spitting image of the hero’s dead wife, while he is a ringer for her lost love. Other residents of an ancient Atlantean civilization are also returned to life in this tale of spirit travel, reincarnation, occult powers, teleportation, a subterranean city, the elixir of life, and considerable mythic depth. One of the last novels from the author of King Solomon’s Mines.

The story which is narrated in the following pages came to me from the lips of my old friend Allan Quatermain, or Hunter Quatermain, as we used to call him in South Africa. He told it to me one evening when I was stopping with him at the place he bought in Yorkshire. Shortly after that, the death of his only son so unsettled him that he immediately left England, accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into the dark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of which he has heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in the vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find them before he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companions have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return. One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from a mission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about three hundred miles north of Zanzibar. In it he says they have gone through many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and have found traces which go far towards making him hope that the results of their wild quest may be a “magnificent and unexampled discovery.” I greatly fear, however, that all he has discovered is death; for this letter came a long while ago, and nobody has heard a single word of the party since. They have totally vanished.

To return to old Magepa. I had known him for many years. The first time we met was in the battle of the Tugela. I was fighting for the king’s son, Umbelazi the Handsome, in the ranks of the Tulwana regiment–I mean to write all that story, for it should not be lost. Well, as I have told you before, the Tulwana were wiped out; of the three thousand or so of them I think only about fifty remained alive after they had annihilated the three of Cetewayo’s regiments that set upon them. But as it chanced Magepa was one who survived.

Haggard tells the story of Cleopatra from the viewpoint of an Ancient Egyptian priest who is given the responsibility of overthrowing the supposed impostor Cleopatra. Haggard, who often employed hints of adventure and exoticism, portrayed Cleopatra as witty and devious, and she has an overwhelming presence that all can feel. Cleopatra, like the other characters, is both good and evil at the same time; forcing readers to both empathize and despise her. Thought provoking and beautifully illustrated, this classic tale captures the imagination of readers of all ages and inspires a love of literature and reading.

This book, although it can be read as a separate story, is the third of the trilogy of which Marie and Child of Storm are the first two parts. It narrates, through the mouth of Allan Quatermain, the consummation of the vengeance of the wizard Zikali, alias The Opener of Roads, or “,” upon the royal Zulu House of which Senzangacona was the founder and Cetewayo, our enemy in the war of 1879, the last representative who ruled as a king. Although, of course, much is added for the purposes of romance, the main facts of history have been adhered to with some faithfulness.

Allan Quatermain, continues to indulge his penchant for globe-trotting adventure in a tumultuous journey across Africa. Upon his arrival, he discovers that one of his closest friends has fallen head over heels in love with one of the most beautiful – and dangerous – women in the world, and he will stop at nothing to win this accused witch’s affection. Will Quatermain be able to intervene before it’s too late – or will he succumb to the vixen’s charms, as well?