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Lanterns in Kôr [see p. 222
Maurice Greiffenhagen
1888
Lithograph
11 cm high by 8.5 cm wide (4 ⅜ by 3 ⅜ inches), facing p. 217 in Chapter XVIII, “'Go, Woman!'” framed
Eleventh regular illustration for H. Rider Haggard's SHE: A History of Adventure, facing page 217 in the Longman's British edition (1888).
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham
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About fifteen paces from the mouth of the cave we found three chairs placed, and here we sat and waited, for as yet no dancers were to be seen. The night was almost, but not quite, dark, the moon not having risen as yet, which made us wonder how we should be able to see the dancing.
“Thou wilt presently understand,” said Ayesha, with a little laugh, when Leo asked her; and we certainly did. Scarcely were the words out of her mouth when from every point we saw dark forms rushing up, each bearing with him what we at first took to be an enormous flaming torch. Whatever they were, they were burning furiously, for the flames stood out a yard or more behind each bearer. On they came, fifty or more of them, carrying their flaming burdens and looking like so many devils from hell. Leo was the first to discover what these burdens were.
“Great heaven!” he said, “they are corpses on fire!”
I stared and stared again — he was perfectly right — the torches that were to light our entertainment were human mummies from the caves!
On rushed the bearers of the flaming corpses, and, meeting at a spot about twenty paces in front of us, built their ghastly burdens crossways into a huge bonfire. Heavens! how they roared and flared! No tar barrel could have burnt as those mummies did. Nor was this all. Suddenly I saw one great fellow seize a flaming human arm that had fallen from its parent frame, and rush off into the darkness. Presently he stopped, and a tall streak of fire shot up into the air, illumining the gloom, and also the lamp from which it sprang. That lamp was the mummy of a woman tied to a stout stake let into the rock, and he had fired her hair. On he went a few paces and touched a second, then a third, and a fourth, till at last we were surrounded on all three sides by a great ring of bodies flaring furiously, the material with which they were preserved having rendered them so inflammable that the flames would literally spout out of the ears and mouth in tongues of fire a foot or more in length.
Nero illuminated his gardens with live Christians soaked in tar, and we were now treated to a similar spectacle, probably for the first time since his day, only happily our lamps were not living ones. [Chapter XIX, “'Give Me A Black Goat!',” pp. 222-223]
The placement of this particular illustration in the chapter previous to the one which contains the passage realised may, of course, be a mere accident of organisation at Longmans. However, this placement creates within the readers a sense of anticipation as they naturally wonder why a young Amahagger tribesman is running through a cave carrying aloft a flaming human forearm as if it were a conventional torch. In the background Greiffenhagen has placed the cloaked Ayesha and the three adventurers as the chief spectators, and shows a group of Amahagger preparing two other corpses to be set alight. To the right, behind the crazed runner, a staked mummy is already illuminating the grisly "cancan" with three feet of flame emanating from its head.
After the outdoor is well lit, a chorus of a hundred male and a hundred female Amahagger in two lines enact a kind of grisly ballet, or, as Holly so quaintly describes the evening dance, "sort of infernal and fiendish cancan" (224) involving "a good deal of tossing of legs and double-shuffling, . . . more of a play than a dance" (224) illuminated by a constantly replenished bonfire of mummified corpses. In the anti-masque, a sort of jungle animal pantomime, a particularly attractive leopard turns out to be Ustane in disguise.
Haggard, H. Rider. "SHE:" A History of Adventure. Illustrated by E. K. Johnson. The Graphic Magazine, Vols. XXXIV and XXXV. 2 October 1886 to 8 January 1887.
Haggard. H. Rider. SHE: A History of Adventure. Illustrated by E. K. Johnson. New York: Harper & Bros., 1887.
Haggard, H. Rider. SHE: A History of Adventure. Illustrated by Maurice Greiffenhagen and Charles H. M. Kerr. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888, rpt. 1927.
Haggard, H. Rider. She. Project Gutenberg EBook #3155 produced by John Bickers; Dagny; William Kyngesburye; David Kyngesburye; David Widger. 2016. Web. Accessed 9 May 2025.
Royal Mummies recently Unbandaged at the Boulak Museum, Egypt. The Graphic Magazine, No. 870, Vol. XXXIV. 31 July 1886, p. 102 and 109.
Created 14 May 2025