Ayesha

A Cambridge professor, Horace Holly and his adopted son, Leo Vincey, travel to Africa, following instructions on a potsherd, ( A sharp edged broken piece of Pottery or Glass) left to Leo by his biological father. (Haggard made a physical copy of the potsherd which is now in the collection of Norwich Castle Museum.)

They encounter a white queen, Ayesha, who has made herself immortal by bathing in a pillar of fire, the source of life itself. She becomes the prototypical all-powerful female figure. She is to be both desired and feared. She is a breathtakingly beautiful creature who will not hesitate to kill any one who displeases her or stands in her way. The travelers discover that Ayesha has been waiting for 2000 years for the reincarnation of her lover Kallikrates, whom she had slain in a fit of jealous rage.

She believes that Vincey is the reincarnation of Kallikrates. In the climax of the novel, Ayesha takes the two men to see the pillar of fire. She wants Leo to bathe in it as she did so that he can become immortal and remain with her forever. His doubts about its safety lead her to step into the flames once more.

However, with this second immersion she reverts to her true age and immediately withers and dies. Before dying she tells Vincey, "I die not. I shall come again."

Throughout the book Haggard explores the themes of power, life, death, reincarnation, sexuality, and fate. In the original novel, Ayesha is to a great extent selfish and amoral, caring very little for the feelings or even the lives of others so long as she gets what she wants.

However, it is evident that, in the course of writing the novel, Haggard moved away from a purer conception of feminine evil. Indeed, one sees the process of transition fossilized in this sentence from the chapter entitled “Ayesha Unveils”: I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil — at least, at the time, it struck me as evil.