Allan Quartermain
At the beginning of this adventure Quatermain has lost his only son and longs to get back into the wilderness. Having persuaded Sir Henry Curtis, Captain John Good, RN, and the Zulu chief Umslopogaas to accompany him they set out from the coast of east Africa into the territory of the Masai and while staying with a Scottish missionary are attacked by a group of these tribesmen whom they overcome with heroism. There follows a voyage by canoe along an underground river to a lake in the kingdom of Zu-Vendis on the other side of a range of mountains. The Zu-Vendi are a warlike white race entirely isolated from other African races and when Curtis and Quatermain’s party arrives are ruled jointly by two sisters, Nyleptha and Sorais. The priests of the Zu-Vendi religion are hostile to the explorers but they are protected by the queens: however both fall passionately in love with Curtis and this together with the rejection by Nyleptha of the nobleman Nasta results in a civil war between them (Sorais and Nasta’s forces against those of Nyleptha, Curtis and Quatermain). After a battle in which Queen Nyleptha’s forces are outnumbered she is nevertheless victorious but then threatened by the treachery of the priests who plan to murder her in the palace. Umslopogaas and one loyal warrior manage to save her from this, killing Nasta and the chief priest Agon in the Fight on the Stairway. Sorais, defeated and jealous, takes her own life: Nyleptha and Curtis become King and Queen and Quatermain dies from a wound suffered in the battle.
This is the ending novel of Allan Quatermain series since he dies at end of the story. Rider Haggard is one of my favorites authors and I enjoyed his all novels of Allan Quatermain series. If you like those Lost world genre books and also historical adventure novels you are gonna love this book.
