The Queen of Sheba, and My Cousin the Colonel — Inside the Classic

A Two-Part Structure with a Shared Center

The book is divided into two distinct sections, each with its own title and chapter sequence. "The Queen of Sheba" occupies the first eleven chapters, tracing Lynde's journey from New Hampshire to Switzerland. "My Cousin the Colonel" follows as a separate tale, though it continues with the same characters. The table of contents lists them as independent works, yet the narrative thread—Lynde's encounter with a strange woman and his subsequent search for her—bridges both parts. This structure allows Aldrich to contrast a rustic American opening with a European alpine climax, the shift signaled by chapter headings that move from "In Which There Is a Family Jar" to "From Geneva to Chamouni."

Recurring Images of Transience and Disappearance

The opening mirage of an Oriental city "destroyed by a general conflagration" as the sun rises is not an isolated fancy. Later, on Montanvert, Lynde tells Ruth a story that begins with his New Hampshire ride, and the narrative folds back on itself. The glacier itself is described as "an immense ploughed field covered by a fall of snow that has become dingy," its crevasses hidden—a landscape that promises revelation but withholds it. The Queen of Sheba, when she appears, is as elusive as the cloud-city; Lynde's pursuit of her across Europe mirrors the reader's attempt to fix a meaning to the recurring motif of things seen and then lost.

Movement Between Wild and Domestic Spaces

The journey moves through sharply contrasting settings: the solitary New Hampshire hills where Lynde sleeps in barns and washes in mountain brooks, and the polished interiors of Swiss inns where he examines "crystals and moss-agates and horn-carvings" in M. Couttet's salon. The narrative eye lingers on thresholds—the edge of a glacier, the precipice above the Mer de Glace, the moment when Lynde and Ruth "set out for the rocks overlooking the frozen sea." These border spaces heighten the sense of a story poised between adventure and reflection, between the wild and the cultivated.

The Embedded Tale as Structural Mirror

Midway through the Alpine section, Lynde tells Ruth the story of his own earlier journey—a tale within the tale. He begins with the same details the reader has already encountered: the bank clerk, the horse, the vanishing cloud-city. This recursive device forces the reader to see the first half of the book as a story being recounted, not simply experienced. The effect is to double the distance between event and narration, reminding us that Lynde is both actor and storyteller. The embedded tale also delays the revelation of the Queen of Sheba, stretching the mystery across both sections of the volume.

Readers attentive to the book's architecture will note how the two halves echo each other: a departure, an encounter with the inexplicable, a journey abroad. The recurring image of a city that vanishes at dawn—first in the clouds, later in memory—gives the volume a coherence that its divided title might obscure. The editorial note suggests reading the two tales as a single, deliberately fractured narrative, where the gaps between sections are as meaningful as the scenes themselves.

Sometimes Aldrich’s dawn dissolving those Oriental cities makes me think of how a story’s edges soften with time, the way certain characters linger long after the plot fades. I found that same quiet ache in An Egyptian Princess — Volume 06 — Text and Context, where the past feels less like history and more like a half-remembered morning.