King Solomon’s Mines

H. Rider Haggard published King Solomon’s Mines in 1885, and the book essentially invented the lost-civilization adventure genre as English-speaking readers came to know it. Haggard supposedly wrote it on a five-shilling bet with his brother, who claimed he could not produce anything as good as Treasure Island. He won the bet. The novel sold out edition after edition for years, made him famous, and laid the blueprint for everything from Tarzan to Indiana Jones.

The narrator is Allan Quatermain, a fifty-something professional hunter living in Durban, South Africa, who has been hired by Sir Henry Curtis to find his missing brother in the African interior. Captain Good of the Royal Navy joins them. They march north into uncharted territory, guided by a mysterious Zulu named Umbopa, and end up in the kingdom of Kukuanaland, ruled by the tyrant Twala. There is a witch named Gagool, a long-dead Portuguese explorer’s map, an underground treasure chamber, a battle for the throne, and a near-death escape from the sealed mine that gives the book its title. The colonial-era assumptions in the text have not aged well in many places. Read it as both a landmark adventure novel and a document of its imperial moment.