Allan Quatermain

Two years after King Solomon's Mines made him famous, the elephant hunter Allan Quatermain has buried his only son and lost all wish to live out his days in the comfort of England. “The thirst for the wilderness was on me,” he says; he would go and die as he had lived, among the wild game and the savages.

So he proposes one last expedition to his old companions, the golden-bearded Sir Henry Curtis and the dapper Captain Good: a journey north into the unexplored heart of the continent, toward a rumour that somewhere beyond the lakes survives a hidden white kingdom unknown to the world. With them travels the towering Zulu Umslopogaas, chief and axe-bearer, who wields a great battle-axe he calls the Woodpecker — one of the most magnificent warrior figures in all of Haggard.

Through raiding Masai, an underground river, and every danger of the dark interior, the party fights its way at last into Zu-Vendis: a beautiful, isolated, sun-worshipping land ruled by two royal sisters, the gentle Nyleptha and the passionate Sorais. There the strangers are caught up in a rivalry of queens, a love that crosses worlds, and the civil war that follows — and the treasure-quest of the first book gives way to something larger and more tragic.

Published in 1887, Allan Quatermain is the darker, more elegiac companion to King Solomon's Mines — a second great lost-world adventure by the man who invented the form, opening on grief and closing on sacrifice. It is also a document of the Victorian empire, carrying the colonial gaze and racial attitudes of its age — read here for what it has always been, and seen clearly for what it was.