Allan and the Ice-gods

H. Rider Haggard’s *Allan and the Ice-Gods* closes out his series of eighteen Allan Quatermain novels and short stories, being the fourteenth Quatermain novel published. It also wraps up a trilogy—begun with *The Ivory Child* and continued in *The Ancient Allan*—that centers on the Taduki drug and the character Lady Luna Ragnall. The idea for the book came from Rudyard Kipling, who suggested it to Haggard. The story sends Quatermain into a past-life regression, where he lives as a Stone Age ancestor and faces various adventures. Scholars have noted the novel as a literary treatment of eugenics and evolutionary ideas.

After the awkwardness of their shared Taduki vision in *The Ancient Allan*—in which he and Lady Ragnall nearly married—Allan Quatermain turns down three of her invitations to try the drug again, vowing never to use it. Lady Ragnall tells him she has used it once more and learned that their ancient counterparts, Amada and Shabaka, were actually married. Allan reads in the paper that she has left for Egypt. About six weeks later, he experiences a psychic episode and learns that Lady Ragnall died of heart failure at that same moment, at her husband’s grave in the Temple of Isis. Allan inherits her estate, which Lord Ragnall’s next-of-kin, Mr. Atterby-Smith, had wanted. He gives most of it to charities but keeps a box of Taduki she left him. Tempted to break his vow, he resists until his friend Captain John Good visits. Good persuades him to use the drug, and the two enter a vision together.

In the vision, Allan becomes Wi, a civilized man in a barbaric Ice Age tribe. The tribe worships a man and a mammoth frozen in ice. Wi’s closest friend is Pag, an outcast who invents new technologies. Wi kills the corrupt chief Henga and reforms the tribe, instituting monogamy, decision by council, and new tools. Pag rises in power and stops a wolf attack. Wi and Pag travel to fight a saber-toothed tiger. Wi finds an unconscious young woman named Laleela in a canoe. He falls in love with her, as does his brother Moananga. Most of the tribe thinks Laleela is a witch, and Wi’s wife Aaka wants her dead. Pag urges Wi to marry Laleela to protect her, but Wi knows that would break his own monogamy rule.

A tribe of red-bearded warriors attacks and is defeated. Wi kills an aurochs. When he rejects the ice-gods in favor of Laleela’s faith, the tribe demands a sacrific