The article discusses Kruchenykhʼs poem ‘Zhenshchina v peshchere’, written during the Civil War, when Kruchenykh lived in the Caucasus. The name of the woman in the poem, Aysha (Ayesha) can be considered zaumʼ, but also intertextually refers to the heroine of Sir Henry Rider Haggardʼs novel She (1887), which in the beginning of the twentieth century was several times translated into Russian. Apart from being “light reading” the novel became popular for its mysticism – it was praised by Madame Blavatsky and, later, by for instance Karl Gustav Jung and Henry Miller.