In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [43]
As Queen of the Amahaggar, “She-who-must-be-obeyed” wafts around wrapped up like a corpse in order to inspire fear; but once tantalizingly peeled, under those gauzy wrappings is a stunner, and—what’s more—a virgin. “She,” it turns out, is two thousand years old. Her real name is Ayesha. She claims she was once a priestess of the Egyptian nature-goddess Isis. She’s been saving herself for two millennia, waiting for the man she loves: one Kallikrates, a very good-looking priest of Isis and the ancestor of Leo Vincey. This man broke his vows and ran off with Leo’s ancestress, whereupon Ayesha slew him in a fit of jealous rage. For two thousand years she’s been waiting for him to be reincarnated; she’s even got his preserved corpse enshrined in a side room, where she laments over it every night. A point-by-point comparison reveals—what a surprise!—that Kallikrates and Leo Vincey are identical.
Having brought Leo to his knees with her knockout charms, and having polished off Ustane, a more normal sort of woman with whom Leo has formed a sexual pair-bond, and who just happens to be a reincarnation of Ayesha’s ancient Kallikrates-stealing enemy, Ayesha now demands that Leo accompany her into the depths of a nearby mountain. There, She says, is where the secret of extremely long and more abundant life is to be found. Not only that, She and Leo can’t be One until he is as powerful as She—the union might otherwise kill him (as it does, in the sequel, Ayesha: The Vengeance of She). So off to the mountain they go, via the ruins of the ancient, once-imperial city of Kôr. To get the renewed life, all one has to do—after the usual Haggard adventures and tunnels—is to traverse some caverns measureless to man, step into a very noisy rolling pillar of fire, and then make one’s getaway across a bottomless chasm.
This is how She acquired her powers two thousand years before, and to show a hesitating Leo how easy it is, She does it again. Alas, this time the thing works backward, and in a few instants Ayesha shrivels up into a very elderly bald monkey and then crumbles into dust. Leo and Holly, both hopelessly in love with She and both devastated, totter back to civilization, trusting in Her promise that She will return.
As a good read in the cellar, this was all very satisfactory, despite the overblown way in which She tended to express herself. She was an odd book in that it placed a preternaturally powerful woman at the centre of things: the only other such woman I’d run into so far had been the Wonder Woman of the comics, with her sparkly lasso and star-spangled panties. Both Ayesha and Wonder Woman went all weak-kneed when it came to the man they loved—Wonder Woman lost her magic powers when kissed by her boyfriend, Steve Trevor; Ayesha couldn’t focus on conquering the world unless Leo Vincey would join her in that dubious enterprise—and I was callow enough, at fifteen, to find this part of it not only soppily romantic but pretty hilarious. Then I graduated from high school and discovered good taste, and forgot for a while about She.
For a while, but not forever. In the early 1960s I found myself in graduate school, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There