Some thoughts on Haggard's She

Obviously the key thing about this novel is the complex (not to mention ravishing) figure of Ayesha herself -- a figure of both desire and fear -- She-who-must-be-obeyed. She is a two-thousand-year-old virgin who has clung adamantly all this time to her love for Kallikrates and her hatred of his lover, Amenartas. All of this is absurd, yet the absurdity lends force to the symbolism. There is something of Artemis in Ayesha: the eternally virgin maiden-goddess whose beauty is dangerous to look upon. Another curious detail is that she is Arabian, although she is always described in terms of her pure whiteness. She is older than Mohamed or Christ. She remembers the pagan gods of the early Arabs, although she herself was a priestess of Isis. Holly tries to explain Christianity to her, but she's only interested in Christ as a male, as a Man. "The religions come and the religions pass," she tells Holly, "and civilizations come and pass, and naught endures but the world and human nature." A pretty atheist, for all her godlike powers.

Aside from the fascination of She herself, a couple of things caught my eye as a science fiction reader. First was that despite the fantastic nature of much of the adventure, Haggard continually insists that none of this is supernatural. "Nay, nay; O Holly ... it is not magic, that is a dream of ignorance," Ayesha says when she shows Holly an image of the past in the surface reflection of a vessel of water (shades of Galadriel's mirror, as others have pointed out). "There is no such thing as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature." This is pretty close to Clarke's Law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And indeed, Merritt's The Moon Pool is in many ways the belated advancement of this concept, in which all manner of fantastic powers common in the old romances are rationalized in the pulp super-science terms of the day.

The other striking thing to these science fictional eyes was the world-building involved in the ancient lost city of Kôr. This was the book's other major contribution to the literature. It is fundamentally an expression of Ayesha's comment above that "civilizations come and pass, and naught endures." The ancient empire of Kôr is long gone, with all its splendor and riches and life. All that remains is a degenerate tribe of savages living in the ruins, with their alien female-centered marriage customs and cannibalistic hot pots. This is clearly something that made an impression on Edgar Rice Burroughs, amongst others, perhaps Wells' The Time Machine too, from a different angle. Haggard's concept seems to have been influenced by the archeology of the day, particularly the Egyptology that had such an effect on popular literature. (It seems to me that Sumer would have been a better reference, but it was perhaps still too obscure in 1887.) The ancient inhabitants of Kôr had perfected a form of preserving corpses in a completely undecayed form, which is played for several macabre effects. They were also great architects and engineers, and the ruins are fantastically elaborate and extensive. Here Haggard references the great feats of Victorian engineering, such as the Suez Canal and the Mont Cenis tunnel through the Alps, that were such a matter of pride in his day. There is a powerful scene toward the end of the book when Ayesha shows them a statue of the goddess Truth worshipped by those ancient people. It's an Ozymandias moment. "By Death only can thy veil be drawn, O Truth!" reads the inscription on the statue. Yet even chastened by this warning about the limits of understanding, Holly notes that the representation of the World as a globe in the sculpture is suggestive of scientific knowledge long before anybody else had figured out that the Earth is spherical. The penetrating spirit of science dances with the swirling, irrational lusts and fears of sex in this novel, setting a template for much to come.