Many Lost World and Lost Race novels are simple adventure stories, but a handful wrestle with the ethical implications of Britain’s exploitation of the native people in the countries it occupied. H. G. Wells turned the tables on British imperialists in
The War of the Worlds
(1898), which portrays Earth as the victim of uninvited colonization by hostile aliens from Mars. In his novella
Heart of Darkness
(1902), Joseph Conrad told the story of the sailor Marlow, who made a harrowing journey up the Congo River; Marlow describes in exacting detail the savagery and squalor perpetrated by white explorers who, like Quatermain, try to profit from Africa’s natural riches. In Nostromo (1904), Conrad again depicted the corruption and destruction brought by colonialism; the title character is charged with, and eventually loses his life, protecting the bounty of an Englishman’s silver mines.
Even the creator of Sherlock Holmes was influenced by the craze for Lost World and Lost Race fiction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle set his
The Lost World
(1912), the first of his five Professor Challenger stories, on a volcanic plateau. In a hidden Amazon rainforest, George E. Challenger’s expedition uncovers the ultimate lost race—dinosaurs—and soon the creatures threaten his life. Writing about Challenger, Doyle’s second most famous creation, provided the author with a much-needed break from writing the Holmes mysteries.
In America, Edgar Rice Burroughs successfully perpetuated the Haggard legacy with
Tarzan of the Apes
(1914), the story of a British nobleman orphaned in Africa and raised by wild animals. The plot is reminiscent of Haggard’s work as well as of Kipling’s
Jungle Books.
In
Return of Tarzan
(1915), the hero grows tired of the civilized city life to which he has been restored, just as Haggard’s hero does in later installments of the Quatermain saga. Tarzan appears in more than twenty sequels, several of which describe his encounter with the fabled lost city of Opar. In a second adventure series that employs many conventions of the Lost World genre, Burroughs’s character John Carter travels to Mars and throughout outer space.
Science-fiction author Michael Crichton could be called the H. Rider Haggard of today. His
Congo
(1980) is a Victorian adventure novel in the style of
King Solomon’s Mines.
In the opening pages, a group of eight explorers searching for the lost city of Zinj are slaughtered by an unknown menace. Crichton traces the journey of the recovery team, who uncover hidden diamonds, angry natives, and unnamable horrors.
Author Alan Moore, another fan of adventure yarns, borrows Haggard’s hero Allan Quatermain, as well as characters from Bram Stoker’s
Dracula,
H. G. Wells’s
The Invisible Man,
Jules Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,
and other best-sellers of the nineteenth century for his graphic two-volume novel set in the Victorian era,
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
(2000). Quatermain is the leader of a group that tries to stop a villain from firebombing the East End of London. In the end, the villain turns out to be none other than Professor Moriarty—Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis. In the second volume, Moore has Burroughs’s Mars expert John Carter assist his other heroes in an interplanetary conflict straight out of Wells’s
The War of the Worlds.
In 2003 London-based travel writer Tahir Shah, an ethnic Afghan, published the entertaining true story of his search for treasure in Africa,
In Search of King Solomon’s Mines.
Armed with a map bought at a flea market in Jerusalem, Shah hires a superstitious Ethiopian cabdriver as his guide through the capital city of Addis Ababa and its rural surroundings. The resulting rollicking travelogue, a humorous version of Haggard’s adventure tales, provides an interesting rendition of Ethiopian history.
Haggard’s Sequels
to King Solomon’s Mines
Allan Quatermain—
the first and what some believe to be the best sequel to King Solomon’s
Mines
—finds its hero mourning the loss of his son Harry. Weary of effete, civilized Britain, Quatermain returns to Africa to get in touch with his primitive self. Accompanied by Sir Henry Curtis, Captain John Good, and the Zulu guide Umslopogaas, Quatermain searches for a mythical race of white Africans. A civil war erupts when the adventurers discover the civilization of Zu-Vendis and its two queens both fall in love with Curtis. After the war Quatermain discovers that an assassin has been dispatched to murder the winning monarch. Adventure ensues as Quatermain rushes across the country to save her.
Over the next forty years, Haggard continued to write sequels to
King Solomon’s Mines,
which include
Maiwa’s Revenge
(1888),
Allan’s Wife
(1889),
Marie
(1912),
Child of Storm
(1913),
The Holy Flower
(1915),
The Ivory Child
(1916),
Finished
(1916),
The Ancient Allan
(1920),
She and Allan
(1921),
Heu-Heu; or, The Monster
(1924),
The Treasure of the Lake
(1926),
and Allan and the Ice-Gods
(1927).
She: A History of Adventure
Haggard’s fantasy-adventure
She
has left an impact on literature equal to that of his Quatermain saga. Psychologist Carl Jung considered the title character—also known as Ayesha or “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed” —an archetype of woman that exists in the subconscious of all men. Immortal and all-powerful, Ayesha is also fickle and unforgiving.
The search for inner Africa as described by Haggard fascinated Jung and his mentor Sigmund Freud.
She
was one of Jung’s favorite books, and he wrote about it throughout his career. In his
Interpretation of Dreams
(1899), Freud calls
She
“a strange work, but full of hidden meaning.” Freud found Haggard’s novel therapeutic enough to recommend it to a patient, as he recounts in Interpretation.
She
and its three sequels sold almost as well as
King Solomon’s Mines
and were equally important in the development of Lost World and Lost Race novels. Many authors of fantasy novels took cues from Haggard’s creations, including C. S. Lewis, who wrote “The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard,” an article addressing the author’s myth-making ability. Lewis’s
The Chronicles of Narnia
series (1950-1956) draws noticeably on the tales of Haggard, as does
The Lord of the Rings
(1954-1956), by Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien.
Hundreds of writers have imitated Haggard over the years, but only French author Pierre Benoit has been openly criticized for thematic similarities. Benoit sued reviewer Henry Magden when the latter claimed that the subterranean Queen Antinea from Benoit’s book
L‘Atlantide
(1919) too closely resembled the title character of She. Benoit lost the case, although it was never proven that he had even read
She
before writing
L’Atlantide,
whose ruthless Antinea labels and preserves her dead lovers in a mysterious metal from Atlantis.
L’Atlantide,
which was translated into more than fifteen languages, became a classic in its own right and won the Grand Prize of the French Academy.
Film
More than thirty films have been made from the works of H. Rider Haggard, including six versions of
King Solomon’s Mines,
two of
Allan Quatermain,
and twelve of
She.
The 1937
King Solomon’s Mines,
directed by Robert Stevenson, cast African-American screen and theater legend Paul Robeson as Umbopo. The special effects, especially the bubbling lava, are impressive for this early film, which also includes excellent fight scenes. As with most film adaptations of the book, this version also inserts a white female love interest. Sir Cedric Hardwicke plays Allan Quatermain, Robert Adams is King Twala, and John Loder portrays Sir Henry Curtis.
A 1950 remake of
King Solomon’s Mines
by MGM, directed by Compton Bennett and Andrew Morton, is the first color adaptation of Haggard’s novel. Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr play Quatermain and Elizabeth Curtis, a wealthy Englishwoman whose husband has disappeared while searching for African diamond mines. The film earned three Oscar nominations and won two awards, including Best Cinematography. More recently,
King Solomon’s Mines
(2004) was revised as a television miniseries starring Patrick Swayze and Alison Doody.
The best-known films inspired by
King Solomon’s Mines
are those of the Indiana Jones trilogy, co-written by George Lucas and directed by Steven Spielberg. Allan Quatermain is clearly the prototype for Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, the swaggering, khaki-clad explorer in the broad-brim hat. The first film,
Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981), introduces Indy, a professor and archaeologist who leaves the university to try to prevent the Nazis from obtaining the Ark of the Covenant, an ancient artifact that would allow the Nazis to raise an invincible army. Several tricks seem cribbed from the 1950 version of
King Solomon’s Mines,
including the use of a falling boulder to block the mouth of a cave. The movie then cycles through multiple action-adventure situations: booby traps, snake pits, duels, chase scenes, and explosions.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
won four Academy Awards and sparked two less successful adaptations of Haggard’s work, a 1985 version of
King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold
(1987), both starring Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(1984) has an occult twist, with many scenes that seem inspired by a 1935 film version of
She.
Kate Capshaw plays Willie, the love interest who constantly bickers with Indy. Jonathan Ke Quan plays Short Round, Indy’s tiny Asian sidekick who accompanies Indy as he attempts to wrest five mystical gems from the underground caves of the Kali-worshiping Thuggee cult. Gruesome incidents abound, including a feast of monkey brains and a priest ripping the heart out of a living human sacrifice.
Sean Connery—who is Allan Quatermain in the 2003 film version of
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
—plays Indy’s father, Henry Jones, in
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
(1989), a prequel to the first two Indiana Jones films. Kidnappers abduct the elder Jones, a medievalist who knows the location of the Holy Grail, the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper that is purported to grant eternal life. Indy embarks on a search for both his father and the Holy Grail, encountering tanks, zeppelins, and biplanes along the way. The film’s opening sequence—featuring a twelve-year-old Indiana Jones, played by River Phoenix—reveals the origins of the scar on Indy’s chin, his signature hat, and his fear of snakes.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
THE SPECTATOR
There can be no doubt that it is more difficult for the novelist of today to write a fresh and novel book of adventure than it was for his predecessors. The possible combinations of human life are in theory infinite, but the practical and probable are limited. Mr. Haggard’s main idea is one of these; for treasures have doubtless often been buried, and sometimes been found. But it is not novel. It has been used before, and pretty frequently; and used, too, in something of the same way that Mr. Haggard uses it. The frontispiece, with its mysterious markings, which is, we are told, the map of the way which a discoverer must travel, reminds us at once of the paper by which, in the “Gold-Bug” of Poe, the whereabouts of the buccaneer’s buried store of gold is identified. But Mr. Haggard’s invention is not at fault, and enables him to invest the central incident of his story with a certain weird originality which takes away all idea from the reader that he has been reading the same things before. It was a happy thought, in the first place, to make the treasure King Solomon’s. That is a name to conjure with as well in the West as in the East; and though we do not remember that diamonds figure in the Scripture catalogue of that potentate’s wealth, we are ready to believe that his treasury was rich beyond the dreams of avarice. It may even be said that the Scriptural associations of the name give a certain verisimilitude to the story, something in the same way in which the sailor’s introduction of Pharaoh’s chariot-wheels did to his yarn about the Red Sea. But there is more than this. It is an absolute stroke of genius when, in the ice-cavern, the discoverers find frozen into permanence the actual form of the old Portuguese adventurer of three hundred years before, and can even trace—so unchanged is the figure—the very wound in his arm from which he drew the blood wherewith he was to trace the map that was to guide some more fortunate adventurer. We felt when we reached that point that we were in the hands of a story-teller of no common powers; nor did the rest of the narrative, so skilfully and so high is the interest piled up, at all disappoint our expectations. The descriptions of battles do not easily admit of striking variations; yet no one will hesitate to allow this merit to the great fight between King Twala and King Ignosi, with the forlorn-hope of the Greys, who go into battle two thousand strong and come out with sixty, and the truly Homeric duel between King Twala and Sir Henry Curtis. It reeks, perhaps, a little too much of blood, but it is as effective a piece of writing as we have seen for a long time. The final scene in the cave, too, is very thrilling, the apparent hopelessness of the situation and the final escape being equally well managed.