A caravan reaches a gold-trading city in the African interior ruled, in Haggard’s imagining, by Phoenician merchants. Elissa, a priestess of Baaltis, is loved by a visiting Hebrew prince and coveted by Ithobal, king of the surrounding tribes, and the city’s fate turns on her choice. The story rests on the now-discredited belief that Great Zimbabwe was built by Phoenicians.
A short, dark romance of a lost city; its racial and historical assumptions are those of 1900. Download the free EPUB.