Cleopatra

Harmachis is the last living heir of the old royal line of Egypt, raised in secret and initiated into the deepest mysteries of Isis to be his country's deliverer. Sent to Alexandria as the chosen hope of a vast underground conspiracy, he is to win his way into the palace, kill the foreign queen Cleopatra, and be crowned the first native Pharaoh in generations — driving Greek and Roman from the sacred land. The plot is ripe, the night is fixed, the dagger is ready.

And at the last moment Harmachis fails — not through cowardice or mischance, but because Cleopatra turns on him the one weapon his training never armed him against. She lets him love her. In a single night she unmakes the deliverer of Egypt, wins from him the secret of the conspiracy and the hidden treasure of the Pharaohs, and casts him aside. The rest of the book is the slow, terrible working-out of the vengeance the title promises, as the ruined priest becomes at last the unseen hand behind the asp.

Told in the first person as the confession of a dead man — three papyrus rolls recovered from a tomb — Cleopatra is a graver, stranger book than the African adventures that made Haggard famous. It is a full-dress tragedy of destiny and downfall, with one of the great Victorian femmes fatales at its centre, and behind it the whole Egypt-haunted imagination of its age. Honest about its period Orientalism and its dream of the ancient East, it remains a spellbinding romance of the fall of the last Pharaohs.

This edition presents the complete novel in clean, modern typesetting, with an editor's foreword on the book and its author, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.