King Solomon's Mines

Allan Quatermain, a weathered elephant hunter based in Durban, is approached by the towering Sir Henry Curtis and his cheerful companion Captain Good. Sir Henry's brother has vanished into the African interior on the trail of the legendary diamond mines of King Solomon, and Quatermain holds an old map — drawn in blood three centuries before by a dying adventurer — that claims to show the way.

For a share of the treasure, Quatermain agrees to lead them north: across a killing desert, over a frozen mountain range shaped like a sleeping woman, and into a hidden kingdom no European is meant to have crossed and survived. With them travels a tall, regal Zulu who calls himself Umbopa — and whose true purpose turns a treasure hunt into a war for a stolen throne.

Told in Quatermain's plain, dry, self-deprecating voice — “I am a coward,” he insists, even as he faces charging elephants and massed warriors — King Solomon's Mines moves with a pace that has never been bettered, from the dead man's map to the great battle, the ancient witch-finder Gagool, and the slow stone door of the treasure chamber.

First published in 1885, it founded the entire “lost world” genre and supplied the machinery of the quest adventure that runs down to Indiana Jones. 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.