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Expectations are highest, however, over the attendance at the ball of a certain Princess Ziska, of " extra-ordinary" beauty. Moonlight and the Hour wove their own mystery the mystery of a Shadow and a Shape that flitted out like a thin vapour from the very portals of Death's ancient temple, and drifting forward a few paces resolved itself into the visionary fairness of a Woman's form - a Woman whose dark hair fell about her heavily, like the black remnants of a long-buried corpse's wrappings a Woman whose eyes flashed with an unholy fire and waved her ghostly arms upon the air."įlash forward to contemporary Cairo, where "full season" is in swing, where the "perspiring horde of Cook's 'cheap trippers' " have flocked for their holidays. We are introduced to one such group of British tourists, some of whom are in the lounge of the Gezireh Palace Hotel discussing the arrival of the famous French painter Armand Gervase while others are preparing for a costume ball. " 'Araxes! Araxes!' and wailing past, sank with a profound echo into the deep recesses of the vast Egyptian tomb. There is no messing around as the story begins the prologue puts us in the Egyptian desert of long ago, on a night when "the air was calm and sultry and not a human foot disturbed the silence." A "Voice" breaks the stillness towards midnight, "as it were like a wind in the desert," crying out for Curt Herr, in his introduction to this Valancourt edition of Ziska, notes that 1897 also saw the publication of Stoker's Dracula and Richard Marsh's The Beetle, and that Corelli outsold "Stoker and Marsh by the hundreds of thousands" (xi), which sort of begs the question as to why today she is all but forgotten, which is a true pity. Federico in her book Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture, had an "initial sale greater than any previous English novel," selling twenty-five thousand copies its first week with and fifty thousand over the next seven weeks (2000, University Press of Virginia, 7). Corelli's 1895 The Sorrows of Satan, according to Annette R. One Corelli scholar notes that more than half of her novels were "world-wide best sellers," with more than an estimated 100,000 copies selling annually for several years. The critics of her day had little nice to say about her work, but her reading public loved her, from "the eccentrics at society's lower end" to Queen Victoria herself. Think what you will, but I love Marie Corelli's novels, at least the few I've read so far, with others waiting for my attention on their shelves. "In certain men and women spirit leaps to spirit, - note responds to note - and if all the world were to interpose its trumpery bulk, nothing could prevent such tumultuous forces rushing together."