Las Minas Del Rey Salomón

It was rollicking good fun, I loved the silliness of it (Good's beautiful white legs), but it did have a few eye rolling moments as well the first mention of the lost heir that was obviously going to be Umbopa, the deus-ex-machina of the SOLAR ECLIPSE, finding Curtis' brother.

By common consent one of the greatest adventure novels ever written. Much better than the very silly racist movie with Sharon Stone. Haggard knew Africa and shows real respect for his African characters, notably Ignosi --in fact, in some ways Ignosi seems to maneuver European explorers into taking him back to claim his thron.

An excellent story in the ripping yarns / lost world genre! Very easy to read with a great storyline but you can tell it's from a different era, wouldn't get past the self censorship today.

Great white hunter and guide Allan Quartermaine has been hired by Sir Henry Curtis to aid in the search for his missing brother who disappeared in a remote region of Africa. There, it is rumored, that the source of King Solomon's legendary wealth can be found. Curtis and Quartermaine are joined by Captain Good.This, of course, is the tale of their journey, and the hazards and wonders they experienced.King Solomon's Mines was the prototype of Indiana Jones type adventure stories, and was great fun to read!

It is seldom that a book, even a classic, grabs me like this one. I am in love!Story construction, narrator's voice, elegant turn of phrase, wonderful characters. It's all there. I'm sorry it took me so long to find it.

This is an old fashioned adventure yarn and its hero, Alan Quatermain, is a direct ancestor of Indiana Jones. I'm not going to claim that Haggard even at his best is the same order of classic as the best by Charles Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot or Thomas Hardy. But like fellow Victorians Arthur Conan Doyle or Robert Louis Stevenson or Rudyard Kipling, Haggard really could spin a good yarn. Ten of his books are on my bookshelves. I gobbled those up in my teens and most I remember very, very well even decades later. My favorite of his novels involved Ayesha, known as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, especially the book Wisdom's Daughter. King Solomon's Mines is his most famous novel though, probably helped by the film of that title. It does have humor, some unforgettable scenes and images, and lots of adventure and daring do. Yet I could list several novels by Haggard I liked better. And I think that has to do with Quatermain himself, the epitome of the "Great White Hunter" with the kind of casual racism of the age and glory in bagging game you might expect. I prefer Haggard's Eric, the Viking from Eric Brighteyes. Or Olaf from The Wanderer's Necklace. Or his Odysseus from his Homer homage written with Andrew Lang, The World's Desire. And above all his indomitable Ayesha, one of the great heroines of Victorian literature. So while this is Haggard's best known work, I don't think it's necessarily his best or the one a contemporary reader would enjoy the most.