Frederick Selous travelled to South Africa when he was nineteen and began a career as a big game hunter. His exploits are romanticised in books based upon him and later, films. He wrote books about his adventures and he later became friends with influential men like Cecil Rhodes and Theodore Roosevelt. Today he is most likely remembered as the inspiration for H. Rider Haggard’s character, Allan Quatermain, who first appeared in King Solomon’s Mines, and would feature in a further thirteen novels and other short stories. Scenes in Haggard’s novel in which Quatermain hunts elephants, antelope or takes impossibly long sniper shots most closely align with Selous’ popular image, though Selous is also remembered as a naturalist, explorer, author and supported Rhodes’ war against the Matabele people. In life, Selous was small and said to be an unassuming man. Likewise, Quatermain is a quiet and sometimes timorous character who can summon great courage when he needs to. But in popular culture, especially Sean Connery’s portrayal of him in the 2003 film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – a steampunk postmodern mashup of various characters from 19^th Century literature, his powers are somewhat amplified.

But King Solomon’s Mines is something of a museum piece now. For us, it is a story from England’s colonial past, although it was written during the colonial period. This was an era when the British were pressing into Africa and the diamond trade was begun. The book deals with themes that may provoke criticism from modern readers who look beyond the adventure story to the underlying principles upon which it rests: beliefs about race or women which many in the modern world now eschew, but which are aspects of colonial discourse. Modern readers may find the novel offensive, or they may decide to read it for an insight into the thinking of its time. In considering this it is also interesting to try glean Haggard’s personal views and evaluate how enlightened Haggard, or his character, Quatermain, may have been for the late 19^th Century. There will be opinions formed either way. But in considering the novel on its own terms, we must remember that King Solomon’s Mines is meant, first and foremost, to be an entertainment.

First published in 1885, King Solomon’s Mines tells the story of three Englishmen embarking on a foolhardy mission into Africa with two purposes: to find the missing brother of Sir Henry Curtis, George Neville, who disappeared two years before on an expedition to locate the legendary mines of King Solomon, as well as to find the mines themselves, if they can, and take away their riches. Sir Henry employs the services of Captain John Good and big game hunter, Allan Quatermain, to undertake the mission. Quatermain has an old map of a route to the mines which represents the way that Mr Neville is meant to have taken. The map’s provenance includes a romantic tale about José da Silvestra who attempted to find the mines three hundred years before. He has not only left the map inscribed onto a piece of linen with his own blood, but also a document which Quatermain has had translated by a drunken Portuguese trader (who has conveniently forgotten about it the next morning). The details are colourful. If you need a comparison to understand where this is leading you need only think of the Indiana Jones movies. In fact, the setup is almost identical to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. There is a rescue mission planned which will include going after a great prize. Except, Indiana Jones is usually pitted against Nazis, his natural enemy, while Quatermain can be read as part of the British imperial history of Africa and other nations. Frederick Selous, in fact, participated in both Matabele wars which established British power in southern Africa.

The original dedication in the book is by the narrator, Allan Quatermain, for “all the big and little boys who read it.” Of course, little girls may read it, too, but this is the audience Haggard anticipated for a story of “remarkable adventure”. By 1898 when the book was just over twelve years old Haggard stepped from behind the curtain for a new edition to directly address his readers in a short Author’s Note, thanking his readers and expressing his hope that the book “may continue to afford amusement to those who are still young enough at heart to love a story of treasure, war and wild adventure.” This is the era of the adventure story. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson had been published only two years prior to King Solomon’s Mines. In fact, the story goes, Haggard had been inspired to write the novel after his brother bet him he couldn’t write a tale better than Treasure Island. The time was ripe for it. The end of the 19^th century was a moment in history when exploration and colonisation had created an appetite for stories about faraway mysterious places. Joseph Conrad’s narrator, Marlowe, in Heart of Darkness, expresses this fascination for the unknown:

Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there.’

Not that the idea was for this type of story was new when Haggard wrote King Solomon’s Mines. Jonathan Swift had used the premise for Gulliver’s Travels and tales of exotic or unknown kingdoms had circulated for centuries. Marco Polo’s writings had inspired an interest in the exotic East, and stories of Prester John, long thought to be a real Christian King ruling somewhere in the East, remained popular for centuries. But these stories had a political or commercial interest, or in the case of Gulliver’s Travels and other books like it, tended to be satirical. In more recent times Matthew Riley has contributed a modern take in this area with his Jack West stories based upon a reimagining of wonders and artefacts from the ancient world and the competition to find them. The appetite for this kind of story has also been fed by non-fiction works like David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, the story of Percy Harrison Fawcett, who spent years looking for a lost city in the jungles of South America. But Haggard’s story was meant to be pure entertainment, as his appeal to the young at heart shows. What we see as colonialism, now, was less problematic, then.

Added to this, King Solomon’s Mines is generally thought to be one of the first Lost World narratives. Lost World narratives arose from colonialism, exploiting those “blank spaces” where exciting, mysterious, dangerous adventures could be had. With the advent of satellites and modern travel those blank spaces have largely been coloured in. These days, the likelihood of finding a mysterious new world has to be pushed into the deepest depths of the ocean or into some formerly unexplored cave system. Hollow Earth narratives like Jules Vernes’ Journey to the Centre of the Earth were also Lost World narratives. Now, Science Fiction has largely transformed the genre into explorations of deep space. But before we got to that point there were other similar colonial texts in the genre like Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Doyle’s dinosaur adventure on a remote plateau in South America called The Lost World (Doyle, incidentally, corresponded with Percy Harrison Fawcett), and even Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 film, King Kong, much of which is set on a remote island in the Pacific with a native race and a cast of prehistoric creatures.

Haggard’s tale is not as lavish as these examples but it establishes the tropes: an ancient map with a fantastic story of its origins and how its owner comes to possess it; a driving will to face danger and head into the unknown for riches; and an arduous journey to make it to the destination, where the world becomes transformed once a barrier that protects this Shangrila (a reference to another Lost World narrative, Lost Horizon by English author James Hilton, 1933) is breached.

I don’t think it accidental that the journey undertaken by Quatermain, Sir Henry and Captain Good is suggested as a return to an Edenic paradise. While there is no mention of it in Genesis, there is a tradition in Christian and Jewish culture of a wall that separates the Garden of Eden from the exterior world. The map featured in Haggard’s book, which comes to Quatermain from da Silvestra, is a fairly linear representation of the landscape and the direction of the story, that helps suggest this secluded paradise, tracing the route to be taken towards the mines into Kukuanaland from south to north, eventually following Solomon’s Road north to the Silent Ones, the three precipitous mountains which guard the mines, after passing a natural barrier. To pass into Kukuanaland the party must first survive the desert and then literally ‘breach’ the barrier into King Twala’s country. The barrier, known as Suliman’s Berg, is a long line of mountains running east to west, the uniformity of which is relieved only by two large mountains called Sheba’s breasts:

The nomenclature is quite arresting and Quatermain’s narration makes much of the intersection between the landscape and the female form. Even the map, with the breasts at the middle and the berg jutting out like arms either side, is a vaguely female in form.

Before they have started on their arduous journey across the desert, Quatermain has a sense of the beauty of the world they might enter. As they steam past the coast of Natal he perceives it as a paradise. But by his estimation, paradise is enhanced by civilisation: “The Garden of Eden, no doubt, looked fair before man was, but I always think that it must have been it must have been fairer when Eve adorned it.” It reveals Quatermain’s attitude to the exploitation of the natural world and man’s place in it: that “it requires the presence of man to make it complete.” But it is also an interesting conflation of the female form and the landscape from the start. When their company enters Kukuanaland, Quatermain is taken by the beauty of the place, in contrast to the harsh desert they have just passed through:

The brook, of which the banks were clothed with dense masses of a gigantic species of maidenhair fern interspersed with feathery tufts of wild asparagus, sung merrily at our side, the soft air murmured through the leaves of the silver trees, doves cooed around, and bright-winged birds flashed like living gems from bough to bough. It was a Paradise.

This is an inexplicably fecund world which is metaphorically presented as the feminine form. To enter Kukuanaland the company must overcome Sheba’s Breasts, the twin mountains that stand like sentinels against them:

There, not more than forty or fifty miles from us, glittering like silver in the early rays of the morning sun, soared Sheba’s Breasts; and stretching away for hundreds of miles on either side of them ran the great Suliman Berg. Now that, sitting here, I attempt to describe the extraordinary grandeur and beauty of that sight, language seems to fail me. I am impotent even before its memory. Straight before us, rose two enormous mountains, the like of which are not, I believe, to be seen in Africa, if indeed there are any other such in the world, measuring each of them at least fifteen thousand feet in height, standing not more than a dozen miles apart, linked together by a precipitous cliff of rock, and towering in awful white solemnity straight into the sky. These mountains placed thus, like the pillars of a gigantic gateway, are shaped after the fashion of a woman’s breasts, and at times the mists and shadows beneath them take the form of a recumbent woman, veiled mysteriously in sleep. Their bases swell gently from the plain, looking at that distance perfectly round and smooth; and upon the top of each is a vast hillock covered with snow, exactly corresponding to the nipple on the female breast.

Once they have traversed Sheba’s Breasts and are entering King Twala’s country, Quatermain is struck by the fertile wealth around them – “an earthly paradise” – and once again considers the mountains they have crossed:

The mountains we had crossed now loomed high above our heads, and Sheba’s Breasts were veiled modestly in diaphanous wreaths of mist.

The country they have entered is sexualised; a recumbent woman. She is submissive, with Solomon’s Road, an ancient way (the existence of which none in Kukuanaland can explain) leading directly from Sheba’s Breasts to the mines where “the awful pit” – another sexual reference in this landscape? – is the remains of the mining enterprise and evidence of exploitation, a figurative rape of the wealth of the country.

This kind of reading is off-putting to some while others, from my experience, see the sense of it. In John Thompson’s 1985 screen adaptation of the novel starring Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone, the map is not recorded on a linen fragment, but is an ancient statuette of a woman with inscriptions on her body. The route to the mines can literally be traced across the features of her body. We see this in the novel, too. The landscape is mythologised as a compliant Eve (or Sheba) while women are treated as problematical by the narrative. Quatermain states, “women bring trouble so surely as the night follows the day.” They are mostly tangential to the lives of the protagonists. When considering the reasons for telling his tale at the beginning of the story Quatermain boasts “there is not a petticoat in the whole story”, excepting, of course, Foulata, who is saved from execution by the three white men and assumes a traditionally subservient and supportive role. Then there is Gagoola, ancient and wizened, whose primary characteristics are her manipulations and treachery. She is too old to be thought of sexually. Instead her corpse-like and grotesque appearance evokes fear. The vast population of the women in Kukuanaland are otherwise relegated to the role of weeping for their lost warriors and getting on with things.

The fact is, women in the novel represent a more reliable guide to the attitude of our white protagonists who pose as semi-divine figures from the stars, than with their relationships with other male Kukuanaland characters. It is easy to respect other men with whom you have fought, and so there develops a kind of bro respect between Quatermain’s group and Ignosi, the new king. By helping to prosecute a war against King Twala, Quatermain and his company actually earn some of the commendation they previously enjoyed through trickery. But when offered a Kukuanaland bride for his services he tells the king, “we white men wed only with white women like ourselves. Your maidens are fair, but they are not for us!” Later, after the death of Foulata, whom Captain Good had developed affections for, Quatermain callously remarks, “I consider her removal was a fortunate occurrence” and goes on to explicitly make the point about her race: “no amount of beauty or refinement could have made an entanglement between Good and herself a desirable occurrence; for, as she herself put it, “Can the sun mate with the darkness, or the white with the black.” It’s an interesting verbal sleight. The relationship would not have been a romance, merely an “entanglement”, and the ultimate blame for this wisdom is expressed in the words of Foulata, herself. There is an interesting difference here between a landscape that can be imagined as a suitable female receptacle and a black woman who can’t.

Nevertheless, on the subject of race, we get a sense that Quatermain’s attitude may be far more enlightened than many men of this era when slavery in America was still recent. At the beginning of his story Quatermain tells us, “I have had to do with niggers” but he immediately corrects himself: “no, I will scratch out that word “niggers”, for I do not like it.” Clearly, the word is still used commonly enough that Quatermain uses it unthinkingly, only to then reveals a more enlightened attitude. In the 1985 film version there is a nod to this issue when Richard Chamberlain’s Quatermain releases a group of slaves before making his own escape. Nevertheless, Haggard’s Quatermain is a man of his time, as is the novel.

For instance, the association of the Biblical King Solomon with the mythical history of Kukuanaland is another indication of the contemporary attitudes of the time. King Solomon is credited with the erotic poem known as ‘Song of Solomon’ in the Bible. A brief extract reveals its style:

• Your breasts are perfect;
• they are twin deer
• feeding among lilies.
• I will hasten to those hills
• sprinkled with sweet perfume
• and stay there till sunrise.

Here we again see the conflation of the female form with landscape. Quatermain, who has only ever read the Bible and the Ingoldsby Legends, speaks of the landscape in ways that echo Solomon from the Bible. And what seems evident is that apocryphal legends surrounding King Solomon are the basis of reimagining Kukuanaland, not as an African nation, but as the beneficiary of a Western civilisation it now no longer understands, nor could replicate: Solomon’s Road; the Mines. The putative presence of Solomon or his emissaries in Africa denies the Kukuanalanders any agency in their own history or pride in the achievements of their forebears. King Solomon is most remembered for his wisdom and the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem. But his reign is also associated with incredible wealth, in part derived from interests in foreign nations, as well as an association with supernatural beings and demonic forces, as Quatermain remembers when they find three colossal statues guarding the entrance to the Mines:

Whilst I was gazing and wondering, suddenly it occurred to me—being familiar with the Old Testament—that Solomon went astray after strange gods, the names of three of whom I remembered—“Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Zidonians, Chemosh, the god of the Moabites, and Milcom, the god of the children of Ammon”—and I suggested to my companions that the figures before us might represent these false and exploded divinities.

It seems like a fanciful aside, but it says much about what the narrative is doing. The three statues are evidently old. Of the three, one is female and naked, with features that “had been injured by centuries of exposure to the weather.” The cave that leads to the treasure that Quatermain, Sir Henry and Captain Good seek is a sacred burial chamber of great antiquity for the Kukuanalanders. It is here that we can most easily understand we are seeing this world through Quatermain’s eyes, even though Quatermain is not equipped to understand its history, traditions or culture. Quatermain’s story is framed as adventure, as though another country is the playground of the British: men like Captain Good who has lost his military commission and now seeks new purpose. So the country is reimagined through Western codes; through the prism of the Solomon myths, with its landscape and purpose refashioned through the eyes of white male explorers. Queen Sheba, after all, is traditionally the lover of King Solomon, though she may be from Africa – may even be the subject of desire in the Song of Solomon – and it is her breasts that are grafted imaginatively upon the landscape.

It is little wonder, then, having walked into the country with a tainted cultural perception informing their understanding of the place, that Quatermain and his men feel it appropriate that they impose Western values on the new king of Kukuanaland. In fact, Quatermain literally dictates the principles upon which Ignosi’s reign will function. Ignosi is made promise,

That if ever you come to be king of this people you will do away with the smelling out of wizards such as we saw last night; and that the killing of men without trial shall no longer take place in the land.

The idea of trials rather than summary execution may sound fine, but Quatermain is intervening to change a culture he barely understands in the space of a single day. That Ignosi remains independent enough to declare no other white men will enter his fabled kingdom once Quatermain, Sir Henry and Captain Good leave, is the remaining hope left for the independence of Ignosi’s kingdom.

Of course, there is one final thing to consider regarding the context of the novel, itself, which pertains to this last hopeful thought. In 1907, with new edition of the novel about to be published, Haggard wrote another note to his readers which was to appear at the end of the story. Unmentioned in his 1898 note, he now speaks of the Matabele, the African people whom he appears to have based his Kukuanas: “… the Kukuanas or, rather, the Matabele, have been tamed by the white man’s bullets, but still there seem to be many who find pleasure in these simple pages.”

Haggard is referring to the defeat of Matabeleland when the British South Africa Company intervened in conflicts between African nations. The British had assumed administrative control over Limpopo, the northernmost province of South Africa. British settlers were moved into the region and big game hunter Frederick Selous had acted as a guide for settlers escorted by the company’s police. Selous was a friend of Cecil Rhodes, the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in the 1890s, responsible for prosecuting the war against the Matabele (and after whom Rhodesia was named). When the Matabele attacked a chief who claimed he was under the protection of the British in 1893, it sparked the first Matabele War. Selous was wounded in the takeover of Bulawayo, the capital of the Matabele king’s land. The town was destroyed and rebuilt as a British stronghold. Lobengula, the Matabele leader, died of smallpox in 1894. Another war was to break out with the Matabele in 1986 when the Matabele revolted against English rule. Selous took part in this war, too. He served as a leader in the Bulawayo Field Force, and later published an account of the campaign. The Matabele were finally defeated in 1898, well before Haggard came to write his Post Scriptum which mentions the conflict.

This is in contrast to Haggard’s fiction in which all works out rather nicely for the white expedition and the African nation they leave behind. By the end we may imagine that the natural defences will hold and Kukuanaland will maintain its independence having been saved by benevolent white men. It’s a fiction that Haggard’s contemporary readers may have indulged. But for us, the real history of Kukuanaland is the history of the Matabele people. It’s a sad fact that darkens the fantasy. Without that – had history followed fiction – I may have merely written that this is an adventure story which was the progenitor for a genre of adventure stories, and there would have been an innocence to the tale which we no doubt wish we could still believe in. As an adventure story, King Solomon’s Mines is a worthy read, but it is hard not to read it without carrying some of its historical baggage, too, unless you can put that aside, understanding that this is a book of its time.