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[Rolan Sacco]

AllanQuatermain is the protagonist of H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines, its one sequel Allan Quatermain (1887), twelve prequel novels and four prequel short stories, totalling eighteen works.[1] An English professional big game hunter and adventurer, in film and television he has been portrayed by Richard Chamberlain, Sean Connery, Cedric Hardwicke, Patrick Swayze and Stewart Granger among others.

The character Quatermain is an English-born professional big game hunter and occasional trader living in South Africa. An outdoorsman who finds English cities and climate unbearable, he prefers to spend most of his life in Africa, where he grew up under the care of his widower father, a Christian missionary.

In the earliest-written novels, native Africans refer to Quatermain as Macumazahn, meaning "Watcher-by-Night," a reference to his nocturnal habits and keen instincts. In later-written novels, Macumazahn is said to be a short form of Macumazana, meaning "One who stands out." Quatermain is frequently accompanied by his native servant, the Hottentot Hans, a wise and caring family retainer from his youth. His sarcastic comments offer a sharp critique of European conventions. In his final adventures, Quatermain is joined by two British companions, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good of the Royal Navy, and by his Zulu friend Umslopogaas.

The series spans 50 years of Quatermain's life, from 18 to 68; at the start of the foundation novel King Solomon's Mines he has just turned 55[citation needed], giving him a birthdate of 1830. Physically, he is small, wiry, and unattractive, with a beard and short hair that sticks up. His one skill is his marksmanship, where he has no equal. Quatermain is aware that as a professional hunter, he has helped to destroy his beloved wild free places of Africa.[citation needed] In old age he hunts without pleasure, having no other means of making a living.

About Quatermain's family, little is written. He lives at Durban, in Natal, South Africa. He marries twice, but is quickly widowed both times. He entrusts the printing of memoirs in the series to his son Harry, whose death he mourns in the opening of the novel Allan Quatermain. Harry Quatermain is a medical student who dies of smallpox while working in a hospital. Haggard did not write the Quatermain novels in chronological order, and made errors with some details. Quatermain's birth, age at the time of his marriages, and age at the time of his death cannot be reconciled to the apparent date of Harry's birth and age at death.[2]

A sixty-year-old Allan Quatermain travels with two fellow Englishmen (Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good) through a remote region of southern Africa with the aim of locating Curtis' missing brother and the lost diamond mines of King Solomon. They cross plains, deserts and mountain ranges on their quest. Quatermain, Curtis and Good reach the lost kingdom of Kukuanaland, inhabited by a warlike race related to the Zulus, and find themselves involved in a bloody struggle for the Kukuana throne.[5]

At a dinner-party in Yorkshire, Quatermain recounts a memorable encounter with a buffalo he once had on a South African hunting expedition. The short story features Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good as minor characters. It also includes a character called the Hottentot Hans, but this is not the same Hottentot Hans who appeared in Marie (1912) and its sequels.[6]

Three years after the events of King Solomon's Mines, Quatermain, Curtis and Good return to Africa to locate a "great white race" hidden in the heart of the Dark Continent. They travel with Umslopogaas, the mighty Zulu warrior, and find the lost world of Zu-Vendis, inhabited by a race of sun-worshippers possibly descended from ancient Persians or Phoenicians. Chronologically this is the last of the Quatermain stories, although it was published early on; Haggard did not write the stories in chronological order.[8]

This novella tells the story of Allan Quatermain's youth in Africa, and of his marriage to Stella Carson. The story involves Quatermain's father, as well as the Zulu character Indaba-zimbi and the evil baboon-woman Hendrika.[6] Hendrika is conjectured to have influenced Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan.[10] While this is speculation, Kipling acknowledged that Haggard's Nada the Lily (1892) was vital in his creation of Mowgli.[10]

In the final short story, Quatermain recounts the bravery of the titular Zulu character, who undertook an admirable feat of endurance to save the life of a child.[7] "Magepa the Buck" was collected in the 1921 Haggard book Smith and the Pharaohs.

In this book, the sequel to Marie and second volume in the Zulu Trilogy, Allan Quatermain becomes involved in the political rivalries between the Zulu princes. The book introduced Zikali, the Zulu dwarf-wizard first mentioned in Marie.[6]

Quatermain and Hans travel with the Zulu Mavovo and the young British collector Stephen Somers in quest of a giant orchid worshipped by a lost race called the Pongo. The book involves battles with Arab slave-traders, cannibalism, occultism, and a huge gorilla-god.[7]

In the sequel to The Holy Flower, Allan Quatermain meets Lord George Ragnall and his beautiful fiance, Luna Holmes, but the latter is kidnapped by the wizard Hart while in Egypt. Quatermain, Hans, Ragnall and his servant Savage reach the lost world of Kendahland, Hart's homeland, to rescue Lady Ragnall. The two Kendah tribes are at war, as one faction worships "the Child," an idol representing the Egyptian god Horus, and the other faction sacrifices to Jana, a giant prehistoric elephant or god who Hart says is the same entity as the Egyptian Set and the Abrahamic Satan.[11] The Ivory Child is the first book in the series to involve the Taduki drug, a mystical herb which induces clairvoyant visions. (Robert E. Howard, who admired Haggard's work, later referenced this drug in one of his own early fragments.[12])

In the sequel to The Ivory Child, Allan Quatermain and Lady Luna Ragnall take the Taduki drug and witness previous incarnations of themselves as well as of other characters from the series (the Hottentot Hans, Lord Ragnall, Hart and Jana) in Egypt under Achaemenid Persian rule. Along with its sequel Allan and the Ice-Gods, this is the only book in the Allan Quatermain series not to be set in nineteenth century Africa.[7]

Quatermain, Hans, Umslopogaas and a Scotsman by the name of Robertson travel to Kr, where they meet Ayesha from Haggard's She (1887) and its sequel Ayesha: The Return of She (1905). The book features a gripping battle between Umslopogaas and the demon Rezu, as well as philosophical discussions between Allan and Ayesha, and a journey made by Allan and Umslopogaas to the land of the dead. Haggard wrote one more Ayesha book, Wisdom's Daughter: The Life and Love Story of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (1923), but it did not feature Quatermain.[14]

In Heu-Heu, Allan and Hans encounter a grotesque cave-painting in southern Africa depicting a fiendish gorilla-monster. Zikali then sends the pair to Heuheualand, the home of the monster depicted in the cave, to obtain a powerful drug he claims to be even stronger than Taduki.

In this posthumously published Quatermain adventure, Allan and Hans travel with a strange sorcerer called Kaneke to Mone-land. This strange lost world is located in the crater of a volcano and is inhabited by the Dabanda people (the nation to whom Kaneke himself belongs), who have attained to high mystical powers and who worship a goddess living on an island in Lake Mone. Allan and Hans meet an Englishman called John Taurus Arkle, who becomes the Chieftain of the Dabanda. While they are in Mone-land they experience many strange and frightening displays of occult powers.[15]

In this sequel to The Ancient Allan, Quatermain again takes the Taduki drug, and witnesses his life in the last great Ice Age, when he was a chieftain called Wi. Allan and the Ice-Gods is the last Quatermain story, and Haggard's friend Rudyard Kipling helped him with the plot. It is set shortly before the events of Allan Quatermain.

The Ayesha series comprises four adventure novels by Haggard: She (1887), Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), She and Allan (1921), and Wisdom's Daughter (1923). Of these only She and Allan is part of the Quatermain series, although Quatermain is mentioned in Wisdom's Daughter. (In the opening lines of that book, Ayesha refers to "one Allan, a wandering hunter of beasts and a fighting man of good blood who visited me at Kr, though of this I said nothing to Holly or to my lord Kallikrates, now known as Leo or the Lion, because as to this Allan I held it wiser to be silent."[16]) The books tell the story of Ayesha, a beautiful and immortal sorceress from ancient Arabia who travelled throughout the ancient world, finally concealing herself in the ruins of the city of Kr around 339 BC. Here she killed the man she loved, Kallikrates, in a fit of jealousy, and was forced to await his reincarnation in the dim vaults and tombs of the dead city for two thousand years. The return of her lover is the premise of She and Ayesha, while the other two books are set before Kallikrates' reincarnation.

In his essay "H. Rider Haggard's Character Hans the Hottentot," Thomas Kent Miller writes that "Haggard successfully made Fate a character in many of his books. It seemed to me that his stories did not come alive due to characterizations or plot developments so much as they did to turnings of Fate."[18]

Mysticism and occultism are prevalent in the Quatermain stories and other works by Haggard. They frequently take the form of metempsychosis, telepathy, elements related to Ancient Egypt and its religion, and the Zulu religion. A common theme relating to metempsychosis and reincarnation in Haggard's works is what R.D. Mullen the "recurring triangle." In Mullen's words:

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