Though the incident was minor, it proved prophetic. Substituting the Eastern vessel for the orthodox basin seemed to anoint the boy with unconventional powers of imagination and an unquenchable desire to travel.
Nicknamed "Nosey" by his schoolmates, young Haggard was to be christened a third time by his devoted African servant, Mazooku, who appears as a character in The Witch's Head (1885). Mazooku was to call Haggard "Lundanda," Zulu for "the tall and pleasant-natured one." Another figure from Haggard's past--that of an old button-eyed, woolly-haired doll that he had called "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed"--was also to appear in his fiction. He was to transfer this title to Ayesha, his most famous fictional femme fatale. Haggard's own most enduring title was created by the British press, which would come to hail him as "King Romance."
Haggard was to write fifty-eight adventure novels, based largely on his travels and other autobiographical experiences, although his early reading evidently influenced his career. The young Haggard obsessively read Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), and he was delighted by The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers (1844-1845), and Edgar Allan Poe's poems.
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