Great Zimbabwe as Haggard imagined it: a Phoenician trading city in the interior, a priestess of Baaltis, and the destruction the temple has coming. Haggard went to South Africa at nineteen; the ruins were a live argument in 1900 — Europeans refused to believe Africans had built them — and this romance takes the Phoenician side of a question archaeology has since settled the other way. It is published here as a period document, with that plainly said. Fifty-nine plates of soldiers, parades and wartime flight from painters including Thomas Robertson and Harry Payne run alongside Haggard's tale, a visual record of the imperial world that shaped his African romance.
