On the Way to the Mines

Allan Quatermain calls himself timid and even a coward but that's somewhat contradicted by the fact that he leads the expedition of 1885's King Solomon's Mines across impassible deserts, through a lost civilisation, and finally into those dark and ancient mines of the title. It's a terrific and obviously influential adventure.

I'd heard it influenced Tolkien and it's very easy to see. Quatermain and his companions hire a man in Africa who turns out to secretly be the rightful king in exile of the secret Kukuana people, hidden across the desert. Allan and his companions receive indestructible chain mail shirts similar to the one of mithril Bilbo and Frodo wear. Of course, this all makes it sound a lot like Black Panther, too.

Like She, a big part of what makes King Solomon's Mines work is the narrator, in this case Allan Quatermain. He's natural and flawed, an unreliable narrator, at least in estimating himself. Author H. Rider Haggard never overplays it, though, allowing Allan to say something nice about himself now and then, as when he describes being able to go toe to toe with an enemy combatant in war before being knocked out like Bilbo in the battle at the end of The Hobbit.

Haggard does a masterful job building suspense around the politics of Kukuana and its sinister, imposter King Twala. When civil war erupts, Haggard's poetic language, and choice to make the Kukuana language translate as old-fashioned, courtly English, really gives it all a sense of epic proportions.

“Ah, these are men, indeed; they will conquer again,” called out Ignosi, who was grinding his teeth with excitement at my side. “See, it is done!”

Suddenly, like puffs of smoke from the mouth of a cannon, the attacking regiment broke away in flying groups, their white head-dresses streaming behind them in the wind, and left their opponents victors, indeed, but, alas! no more a regiment. Of the gallant triple line, which forty minutes before had gone into action three thousand strong, there remained at most some six hundred blood-spattered men; the rest were under foot. And yet they cheered and waved their spears in triumph, and then, instead of falling back upon us as we expected, they ran forward, for a hundred yards or so, after the flying groups of foemen, took possession of a rising knoll of ground, and, resuming their triple formation, formed a threefold ring around its base. And there, thanks be to Heaven, standing on the top of the mound for a minute, I saw Sir Henry, apparently unharmed, and with him our old friend Infadoos. Then Twala’s regiments rolled down upon the doomed band, and once more the battle closed in.