When the World Shook

Humphrey Arbuthnot, a writer of adventure stories, is left a widower by a young wife whose dying word is a promise that they will meet again. Restless with grief, he sails into the Pacific with two lifelong friends — Basil Bastin, a clergyman of immovable faith, and Robert Bickley, a surgeon of immovable scientific doubt. A storm wrecks them, and the three are cast up on the remote South Sea island of Orofena.

Beneath the island, in a sealed vault, they find two figures lying as though asleep in crystal coffins — and asleep they are, held in suspended animation across an almost unimaginable gulf of time. They are Oro, the last king of the vanished “Sons of Wisdom,” whose antediluvian science once sank a continent and could do so again, and Yva, his grave and beautiful daughter, who wakes to look on Arbuthnot with a recognition he cannot explain.

Told through the narrator's searching eyes and set against the flat faith of Bastin and the flat skepticism of Bickley, the story makes its three travellers into three positions in a single great debate. Every marvel the island reveals strikes each of them differently, and the reader weighs faith, doubt, and longing through all three at once — while Oro's cold, world-drowning power presses its own terrible question about knowledge without mercy.

First published in 1919, in the immediate shadow of the First World War, When the World Shook is the late Haggard's argument with himself about death and survival, deep time and human love, and the hubris of a power great enough to remake the world. A product of the imperial age, it is read here for the great questions it stages — and seen clearly for the assumptions of its moment.