Quatermain is hired by a Norfolk gentleman to find his kidnapped wife, and the trail runs to a people beyond the Kendah desert who worship a white elephant, and to a priesthood that has been waiting for a man who can shoot. Haggard went to South Africa at nineteen and helped raise the Union Jack over the Transvaal; the elephant hunt in this one is the best sustained action he wrote. Fifty-eight plates of cattle, horses and sheep from 1800 to 1909, by painters including William Henry Davis and William Webb, mirror the herds and treks that carry Quatermain toward the Kendah country.
