The Ancient Allan

The Ancient Allan by H. Rider Haggard is about one of Haggard's hero Allan Quatermain's previous lives. In the frame story, he and Lady Ragnall (introduced in The Ivory Child) inhale taduki, a fictional drug that induces visions of previous incarnations. Thus, Quartermain relives the experiences of ancient Egyptian aristocrat Shabaka (a descendant of the pharaoh of the same name)—alongside flashes of his earlier lives—and Ragnall those of Amada, an ancient priestess of Isis. Excerpt: "Now I, Allan Quatermain, come to the weirdest (with one or two exceptions perhaps) of all the experiences which it has amused me to employ my idle hours in recording here in a strange land, for after all England is strange to me. I grow elderly. I have, as I suppose, passed the period of enterprise and adventure and I should be well satisfied with the lot that Fate has given to my unworthy self."