In late middle age, with his literary career largely behind him, Haggard was visited by a recurrent dream, which he came to see as a comment on his profession (DML 86–8). In it, he would be led by a faceless guide who in a ‘pictured silence’ showed him an escarpment populated by golden figures ‘which I take it are images and not alive’. In a cleft in the cliff he saw a lake surrounded by tall cedars and pines, from which flowed cascades to the plain beneath. At right angles to the cliff face ran a broad river ‘that, like the Nile, floods the lands at certain intervals and makes them bear a hundredfold’. On its east bank, beyond a mountain range, the daylight opened like a fan until it stretched right across the water ‘as in the funeral painting of Old Egypt the image of the goddess Nout bends across the heavens and holds them in embracing arms’. On the far bank rose a great city with domes and palaces, while between this settlement and river, and slightly below the level of the plain, stood a house in which the author, some years younger than his dreaming self, sat writing at his desk.

The dreaming presence entered this house, and stood in the corner of the room, watching the young Haggard bent over his papers. ‘At what do I work?’ the dreamer asked his guide. He answered ‘You write the history of the world.’

Haggard reacts to this answer with relief, since it implies that his younger embodiment is absorbed in fact rather than fantasy. Yet evidently the dream is a comment on the writing of romances, and the figure at the desk is toiling over his early successes such as King Solomon's Mines and She. Evidently, too, its iconography draws on Haggard's memories of Egypt, a country which he had visited on several occasions. The Nile itself had long inundated the nineteenth-century imagination. In Haggard's lifetime, Generals Gordon and Kitchener had fought modern battles along its banks; yet the water course still seemed infinitely old and strange. In fact, it was the oldest river known to European man, described as long ago as Herodotus, and yet, until Burton and Speke's expeditions of 1857–8, and Speke and Grant's further exploration of 1862, nobody had known where it rose.