Wisdom's Daughter

The Life and Love Story of She Who Must Be Obeyed

The manuscript of which the contents are printed here was discovered

among the effects of the late L. Horace Holly, though not until some

years after his death. It was in an envelope on which had been

scribbled a direction that it should be forwarded to the present

editor "at the appointed time," words that at first he did not

understand. However, in due course it arrived without any accompanying

note of explanation, so that to this hour he does not know by whom it

was sent or where from, since the only postmark on the packet was

London, W., and the address was typewritten.

When opened the package proved to contain two thick notebooks, bound

in parchment, or rather scraped goat or sheepskin, and very roughly as

though by an unskilled hand, perhaps in order to preserve them if

exposed to hard usage or weather. The paper of these books is

extremely thin and tough so that each of them contains a great number

of sheets. It is not of European make, and its appearance suggests

that it was manufactured in the East, perhaps in China.

There could be no doubt as to who had owned these notebooks, because

on one of them, the first, written in red ink upon the parchment cover

in block letters, appears the name of Mr. Holly himself. Also on its

first pages are various memoranda of travel evidently made by him and

no one else. After these follow sheet upon sheet of apparently

indecipherable shorthand mixed up with tiny Arabic characters. This

shorthand proved to belong to no known system, and though every effort

was made to decipher it, for over two years it remained unread.

At length, when all attempts had been abandoned, almost by chance, it

was shown to a great Oriental scholar, a friend of the Editor, who

glanced at it and took it to bed with him. Next morning at breakfast

he announced calmly that he had discovered the key and could read the

stuff as easily as though it were a newspaper leader. It seemed that

the writing was an ancient form of contracted Arabic, mixed in places

with the Demotic of the Egyptians--a shorthand Arabic and a shorthand

Demotic, difficult at first, but once the key was found easily

decipherable by some six or eight living men, of whom, as it chanced,

the learned scholar into whose hands it had thus fallen accidentally

was one.

So it came about that with toil and cost and time, at length those two

closely written volumes were transcribed in full and translated. For

the rest, they speak for themselves. Let the reader judge of them.

There is but one thing to add. Although it is recorded in notebooks

that had been his property, clearly this manuscript was NOT written by

Mr. Holly. For reasons which she explains it was written with the hand

of SHE herself, during the period of her second incarnation when at

last Leo found her in the mountains of Thibet, as is described in the

book called "Ayesha."