King Solomon's Mines

Allan Quatermain, an experienced hunter and guide, agrees to lead the aristocratic Sir Henry Curtis and the blunt, monocled Captain Good into unmapped African interior in search of Sir Henry's brother, who vanished chasing rumors of King Solomon's legendary diamond mines. Their porter, a tall, commanding man named Umbopa, turns out partway through the expedition to be Ignosi, the rightful king of Kukuanaland, exiled as a child when the tyrant Twala seized his throne, and the party throws in with Ignosi's cause once they reach the hidden kingdom, using their own foreknowledge of an approaching lunar eclipse to pose as sorcerers powerful enough to command the sky itself. Ignosi's forces overthrow Twala with the expedition's help, and the ancient witch Gagool, who has ruled the kingdom's superstitions from the shadows for generations, leads the party into the treasure filled mines themselves before attempting to seal them inside to die, a betrayal that costs the life of Foulata, a young Kukuana woman who has helped and cared for the travelers throughout. The men escape the sealed chamber, though not with anything close to the full treasure Gagool guarded, and on their way home they find Sir Henry's long lost brother alive and well, stranded but unharmed at a remote oasis, closing out the expedition's original purpose alongside its unexpected one.

Haggard wrote the book, by his own later account, after reading Treasure Island and wagering with his brother that he could write an adventure just as successful, and the reported six week writing schedule he later claimed was closer to sixteen weeks by his own surviving notebooks. It reads fast, built almost entirely from set piece to set piece, desert crossing, ambush, palace intrigue, entombment, and it established a durable template, the hidden kingdom, the lost civilization, the foreign hero guiding readers into it, that adventure fiction leaned on for decades afterward.

A note of honest caution belongs here too: the novel carries the racial attitudes common to British colonial adventure fiction of its era, even as it also gives its African characters, Ignosi above all, real heroism and interiority that many contemporaries did not bother to grant them.