Sir Henry Rider Haggard was an English writer of adventure novels set largely in Africa, and a founder of the Lost World literary genre. His stories, situated at the lighter end of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential. The Mahatma and the Hare is the story of the selfcalled mahatma — a spiritual man who is able, when asleep, to view "The Great White Road" on which the souls of those recently departed enter heaven — encounters the hare of the title after that animal's death.