In his memoirs John Kotzé, who knew Haggard in Africa, confirms that Haggard's imagination could occasionally run away with the facts: "Those who knew Haggard recognized in him a man of honour and truth. But his ... imagination impelled him into a world of fancy which for the time had complete hold of his sense, and hence he described as fact what was mere fiction." Thus one should not take the doll anecdote as fact, as his biographers have tended to do, but as a vital image, the original version of the femme fatale archetype often manifested in his fiction. Here is the common root of the sinister sorceresses with which his work abounds: both the repulsive, such as the ancient Gagool in
King Solomon's Mines, and the fascinating, such as Ayesha in
She.
In his diary for 15 November 1920, Haggard recalled hearing as a boy a tale concerning a Peruvian tomb whose inner chamber contained "a dead and mummified man at the head of about a dozen other persons ranged round the table." The ring on the dead chieftain's hand was owned--so at least the boy believed--by the man who told the tale.
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