Free Horror: The 100 Best Books by Kim Newman, Stephen Jones

immortality. However, a second exposure robs her of the gift bestowed by the first, and she reverts horribly to her true age. Haggard capitalized on the sensational success of She with several sequels, Ayesha (1905), a direct follow-up, She and Allan (1921), in which Ayesha meets his series hero Allan Quatermain (of King Solomon's Mines (1885), and many others), and Wisdom's Daughter (1923), a romance of the ancient world which goes into Ayesha's origins. She was first filmed in 1899, by George Melies, as La Danse de Feu , and has been remade many times, most memorably by Irving Pichel in 1935 with Helen Gahaghan and Randolph Scott, and by Hammer in 1965 with Ursula Andress, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
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    There's a moment in the 1965 film version of She when a map showing the way to a legendary lost city is produced, and the would-be young explorer urges his hesitant friend to accompany him with the appeal "Do you think you'd ever enjoy another good night's sleep, wondering what might have been at the end of it all?" Thus begins their trek through swamp and mountain, leading at last to the hidden city and a meeting with the eerie sorceress of blinding beauty who dwells there. The quest theme, that "beyond the ranges" notion of a great, undiscovered secret, lies at the very heart of Rider Haggard's haunting 1887 romance of the deathless Ayesha, who has waited two thousand years for the reincarnation of her lost love. Where are they now, those magnificent Victorian yarns of far-off jungles and plateaux tingling with magic and mystery? Today the horrors all seem to be coming to us -- loping through the subway, festering in the creepy old house next door, escaping from the local hospital, even squirming up the plug-hole into the bath Back in 1887, though, the world was a bigger place. In those intrepid days, travellers' tales -- marvellous phrase! -- offered entertainment rather more enlivening than a moan about the water in Majorca. Zanzibar: the cliff of the Ethiopian's Head: the caves of Kor . . . Thumb through an atlas for the settings Haggard selected for She and they're just another part of the hopeless battleground that makes up modern Africa. But read the story and it takes you back a century and more to a time when the ends of the earth were exactly that -- realms created by God for the specific use of authors and their imaginations. And what a tale it is. A broken potsherd with an ancient inscription lures Cambridge scholar Horace Holly and his handsome young ward Leo Vincey to the East African hinterland, home of the savage Amahagger tribe and their all-powerful queen, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Long ago, in the days of the pharaohs, She had bathed in the Flame of Life and made herself immortal. Now she leads a lonely hermit-like existence, living out the weary centuries in the belief that ultimately the lover whom she murdered will be restored to her. Ayesha -- so lovely she must veil her face from those around her. So old that her feet have worn away the stone steps of her mountain palace. So powerful in jealousy that the mere brush of her hand can blast a native girl dead. As the plot takes hold one has the fancy that she had always existed, in some dark dimension of the imagination, and that Haggard was the fortunate author to whom she chose to reveal herself. He was later to write of the novel: "It came faster than my poor aching hand could set it down." After six weeks of sustained, white-hot scribbling he dumped the manuscript on his agent's desk, announcing "There is what I shall be remembered by". Prophetic words. She is far and away the best of his many stirring tales of fantasy and high adventure, which include the classic King Solomon's Mines . I read it first at the impressionable age of thirteen, when the description of Ayesha's terrible, disintegrating end filled my schoolboy's heart with an overpowering sense of loss. At forty-one, it still does: even though I know I have only to pick up the