This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
She is H. Rider Haggard's most famous novel after King Solomon's Mines, and the book that fixed the image of the deathless woman-queen in the English imagination. It opens in a Cambridge study, where a poor, ugly, hen-pecked lecturer named Ludwig Horace Holly is visited by a dying friend, Vincey, who leaves him a locked iron chest and a solemn charge: to bring up Vincey's son Leo, and on his twenty-fifth birthday to open the chest and follow where it leads.
The chest holds an ancient potsherd bearing the writing of Amenartas, an Egyptian princess, and the tale of Kallikrates, a Greek priest whom she loved and whom a mysterious veiled goddess slew in jealousy. Leo and Holly, with Holly's old servant Job, sail for Africa, are wrecked, taken prisoner by the cannibal Amahagger, and led through dead cities to a mountain cave where a veiled figure sits upon a throne — She-who-must-be-obeyed, Ayesha, who has waited two thousand years beside the body of her murdered lover, and who recognises in Leo the reincarnation of Kallikrates.
Ayesha's beauty, her terrible power, her jealousy of the girl Ustane, and her promise to bathe Leo in the Flame of Life drive the story to its climax in the ruined temple of Truth and the cavern of the eternal fire, where the proud queen steps into the flame a second time and is withered into a two-thousand-year-old husk before the eyes of the men she meant to make immortal.
