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PARTISAN REVIEW
through the line of the mother, and ... they never pay at–
tention
to,
or even acknowledge, any man as their father,
even when their male parentage is perfectly well known.
Given the brief appearance of Leo's ancestor, Callicrates, in
Herodotus's history of the Persian Wars, it is notable that there is
an eerie correspondence between the strange land of the
Ama–
haggar and the perverse Egypt Herodotus describes as a country
whose people
in most of their manners and customs, exactly reverse the
common practice of mankind. The women attend the markets
and trade, while the men sit at home at the loom; ... women
stand up to urinate, men sit down.
In each case the country is described as uniquely alien, and alien
in particular because relations between its men and women in–
habitants are exactly antithetical to those that prevail in "nor–
mal" civilized societies. Thus 90th Egypt and Kar, as Haggard's
explorers learn the Amahaggar land is called, are realms where
what patriarchal culture defines as misrule has become rule.
She, Herself, however, manifests the severity of Her misrule
only after some delay. At first, it is Her subjects who enact and
express the murderous female sexuality that She herself tends to
deny. Thus we learn before meeting Her what it means for Her
to be the queen of a people who, bizarrely, "place pots upon the
heads of strangers," for shortly after the explorers arrive in Kar
they are invited to a feast at which a group of the Amahaggar try
to kill the Englishmen's Arab guide, Mahomed, by putting a red
hot earthen pot on his head. This astonishing mode of execu–
tion, a cross between cooking and decapitation, which seems to
have had no real anthropological precedent, is such a vivid
enactment of both castration fears and birth anxieties that it is
hardly necessary to rehearse all its psychosymbolic overtones.
She is absolutely identical with the Byronic femme fatale
who haunted nineteenth-century writers from Keats and Swin–
burne to Pater, Wilde, and Macdonald-so much so that Her
character in a sense summarizes and intensifies all the key female
traits these artists brooded on. Having lived under the hill of or–
dinary reality since classical antiquity, She chats familiarly
about Greek and Arab philosophers with the bemused Holly;
