The Project Gutenberg EBook of She and Allan, by H. Rider Haggard

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Title: She and Allan

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Release Date: April 22, 2006 [EBook #5745]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHE AND ALLAN ***

Produced by John Bickers; Dagny

SHE AND ALLAN

By H. Rider Haggard

First Published 1921.

NOTE BY THE LATE MR. ALLAN QUATERMAIN

My friend, into whose hands I hope that all these manuscripts of mine
will pass one day, of this one I have something to say to you.

A long while ago I jotted down in it the history of the events that
it details with more or less completeness. This I did for my own
satisfaction. You will have noted how memory fails us as we advance
in years; we recollect, with an almost painful exactitude, what we
experienced and saw in our youth, but the happenings of our middle
life slip away from us or become blurred, like a stretch of low-lying
landscape overflowed by grey and nebulous mist. Far off the sun still
seems to shine upon the plains and hills of adolescence and early
manhood, as yet it shines about us in the fleeting hours of our age,
that ground on which we stand to-day, but the valley between is filled
with fog. Yes, even its prominences, which symbolise the more startling
events of that past, often are lost in this confusing fog.

It was an appreciation of these truths which led me to set down the
following details (though of course much is omitted) of my brief
intercourse with the strange and splendid creature whom I knew under the
names of _Ayesha_, or _Hiya_, or _She-who-commands_; not indeed with any
view to their publication, but before I forgot them that, if I wished to
do so, I might re-peruse them in the evening of old age to which I hope
to attain.

Indeed, at the time the last thing I intended was that they should be
given to the world even after my own death, because they, or many of
them, are so unusual that I feared lest they should cause smiles and
in a way cast a slur upon my memory and truthfulness. Also, as you will
read, as to this matter I made a promise and I have always tried to
keep my promises and to guard the se