Maiwa's Revenge

After a long day's shooting at an English country house, the old elephant hunter Allan Quatermain settles by the fire, lights his pipe, and is drawn out by his friends into one of his own adventures — a hunting yarn from the African interior that turns, before it is finished, into a war.

It begins as sport: out after ivory, Quatermain is led into a string of deadly encounters — a charging buffalo, the long pursuit of a great bull elephant — some of the most vivid hunting scenes Haggard ever wrote. Then there comes to his camp a woman in flight: Maiwa, a princess of the Butiana, carrying a scrap of a message from a white man Quatermain had thought long dead, now held prisoner for seven years by the chief Wambe — and carrying, too, a small and dreadful relic. Wambe had murdered Maiwa's infant child, and its severed hand she has kept, as a spur to a vengeance she will not put down.

Justified now by more than ivory, Quatermain throws his skill and his rifles behind a Butiana attack on Wambe's heavily defended kraal, against punishing odds. The war of the little hand is fought, the captive sought, and Maiwa, at the last, avenged. For so short a book the structure is beautifully judged — genial sport giving way to horror and war, the fireside opening turning into something close to a tragedy of vengeance.

Published in 1888, Maiwa's Revenge is Haggard at his most economical: the hunting yarn in its purest form, told aloud by the dry, self-deprecating Quatermain. It is also a document of the Victorian empire, carrying the colonial gaze and racial attitudes of its age — read here for the swift, expert adventure it has always been, and seen clearly for what it was.