Quatermain at eighteen, in love with a Boer girl whose father will not have an Englishman, caught in an attack on her father's farm and then in the Great Trek - and at Dingaan's kraal on the day of Retief's massacre. Haggard went to South Africa at nineteen and helped raise the Union Jack over the Transvaal; here he went back to the country and the history he had known as a young man, and Marie is the first of the Quatermain books chronologically. Fifty-two plates of South African war dances, Cape storms and wagon tracks, among them paintings by Thomas Baines and Edvard Munch, carry the story's own country across the page.