King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard
First published by Cassell & Company, 1885
Category: Classic

I didn’t put it together that I’d picked two books with heroes from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the graphic novel, not the movie, of course) until I was about halfway through King Solomon’s Mines and reflecting how accurately Alan Moore had depicted Allan Quatermain. Moore is responsible for me picturing Quatermain as Sean Connery despite the fact that he looks nothing like the man; Moore’s said he had Connery in mind for the character long before the movie was cast. For those of you more familiar with the 1985 version starring Richard Chamberlain, that image is even farther from the truth. Never mind Patrick Swayze in the 2004 production. The legendary hunter and adventurer Allan Quatermain is self-described as little, dark, and slender, and either “timid” or “a coward” depending on how positive he’s feeling about himself. It’s the wealthy Sir Henry Curtis who’s the attractive, muscular, courageous warrior-hero. Quite a reversal, considering that Quatermain is the narrator and the main character. King Solomon’s Mines is the earliest African adventure novel and the progenitor of the Lost World subgenre, and still extremely entertaining despite (or, depending on the reader, because of) its sometimes archaic and Anglocentric attitudes.

The novel begins with Allan Quatermain explaining how he came to set down the details of this strange adventure (which somewhat kills the tension of later events, since you know he has to survive). He’s approached by Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good to help them make an expedition into the most hostile regions of Africa to try to find Curtis’s estranged brother. This brother was last heard of on his way to discover the legendary diamond mines of King Solomon, which coincidentally Quatermain has a sort of map to. In outfitting the expedition, Quatermain hires an unusual ‘Zulu’ named Umbopo who shows a remarkable lack of respect for his bosses’ white skins, and who is in general much less servile and much more a ‘gentleman’ than the other natives. After traveling for months, losing a number of red-shirted native bearers and nearly dying themselves, the four men find their way to a magnificent land ruled by a cruel usurper named Twala and his hideously ancient bag-of-bones witch doctress advisor Gagool. They make friends with Twala’s half-uncle Infaloos, who tells them how Twala had his brother, the true king, murdered, and drove his brother’s wife and infant son out into the desert. Surprise, surprise, guess who turns out to be the lost son and heir? A short, bloody war doesn’t distract from the main mission, and the trio of adventurers is finally successful in finding both the diamond mines and the lost brother (though by the time I got to the end, I’d almost forgotten about him—that’s how action-packed the book is).

The introduction to my copy says that Haggard wrote this novel on a bet with his brother, who believed he couldn’t write a book as popular and successful as Treasure Island, the big adventure novel of his day. Haggard wrote it in six weeks and then almost didn’t find a publisher, but when it finally sold, it took off like no one expected. The publisher actually had trouble keeping it in print. Haggard’s writing is in stark contrast to his contemporaries, whether literary (Thomas Hardy) or popular (R.L. Stevenson), with a first-person narrator, a lack of flowery language, and some truly bloody scenes. It’s obvious that Haggard knew Africa well and loved the continent, and that Quatermain’s semi-modern attitudes toward the natives reflect his own. Naturally, there’s the sort of reflexive white man’s superiority at times, particularly in portraying the relationship between Quatermain’s companion Captain Good and the beautiful African girl Foulata as impossible because of their skin colors. On the other hand, Quatermain refuses to use the word ‘nigger’ to describe the natives, has tremendous respect for their companion Umbopo and the other warriors of the lost tribe, and even admits his inferiority to these tall, powerful warriors when it comes to battle. I got the sense that Quatermain was about as open-minded as a white man could be in those days, particularly in literature.

The one thing that really threw me was how enthusiastic all three men were about massacring a bunch of elephants for their tusks. I get the thrill of hunting a dangerous animal, I get that the idea of conservation was mostly unheard of back then, but I was still repulsed when I realized that Quatermain’s suggestion that they hunt elephants meant shooting as many of the bulls as they could find, even pursuing the herd after they’d killed the first two. This is definitely not an attitude that’s survived into the modern day.

It really is a thrilling and often bloody adventure. There’s an early scene where one of the servants throws himself in front of a wounded bull elephant to save his master’s life and gets torn in half, very graphically. As with other classics, King Solomon’s Mines may not be as overly gory as contemporary novels, but it’s fun to imagine how grossed-out readers of the late Victorian era would have been by it. I won’t rush out to get any more of Haggard’s novels, but I certainly enjoyed this one.