Walking the Wall

Down with the flu, alternating between chills and sweats, I pulled out a book I picked up looking brand new for 50 cents at the library little 2nd hand book room–”She” by H. Rider Haggard. My friend had recently gifted me an old printing of “Allan Quatermain”  so I thought it fated that I snagged “She”. I grew up loving Edgar Rice Burroughs thanks to my father and Burroughs was heavily influenced by Haggard. While I’m fairly sure I’ve read “King Solomon’s Mines”, I think that is the only Haggard book I’ve read. Anyway, while I expect to read a great deal of British colonialist attitude from this era–I’ve read that Haggard actually wrote with sympathy towards the Africans. I’m not far enough in to assess that, but what I can tell is that he was certainly in love with Africa itself–at times his writing can feel a touch overdone, but sometimes it feels overdone just right:

    The moon went slowly down in loveliness; she departed into the depth of the horizon, and long veil-like shadows crept up the sky through which the stars appeared. Soon, however, they too began to pale before a splendour in the east, and the advent of the dawn declared itself in the new-born blue of heaven. Quieter and yet more quiet grew the sea, quiet as the soft mist that brooded on her bosom, and covered up her troubling, as in our tempestuous life the transitory wreaths of sleep brood upon a pain-racked soul, causing it to forget its sorrow.  From the east to the west sped those angels of the Dawn, from sea to sea, from mountain-top to mountain-top, scattering light from breast and wing. On they sped out of the darkness, perfect, glorious; on, over the quiet sea, over the low coast-line, and the swamps beyond, and the mountains above them; over those who slept in peace and those who woke in sorrow; over the evil and the good; over the living and the dead; over the wide world and all that breathes or has breathed thereon.

It was a beautiful sight, and yet a sad one, perhaps because of its excess of beauty. The arising sun; the setting sun! There we have the symbol and the type of humanity, and of all things with which humanity has to do. (48-49)