King Solomon's Mines

 

As I continue my focus on African literature and history, I listened to an audiobook which was first published in 1885. It’s a famous adventure novel written by H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines. The adventure has to do with the search for the diamond mines of King Solomon, and it requires an overland trip of 1,000 miles from Durban, South Africa, the last 300 miles being done on foot. There are three white men and one quite regal native. One of the Englishmen joined the group in his effort to locate his brother who had headed for his own African adventure some years before. The men are all well-seasoned African travelers, and in the course of this trip, they encounter many African wild animals, jungles, and a desert. They interact with many different tribes along the way. They only knew an approximate location of the mines, and upon arriving in the area, they are faced with climbing very high mountains in search of their goal. This remarkable story was told in narrative form in first person by the protagonist, Allan Quatermain.

 

The thrill of this book is in the details, such as an elephant hunt, other animal encounters, the management of their lack of supplies, becoming involved with warring native tribes, becoming desperate for water as they crossed the desert, and finally getting trapped in the mine where they had found an immense wealth of diamonds, gold, and ivory.

 

The story itself is so compelling that there have been multiple movies made about it. Perhaps the best known is a 1985 movie with Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone. That movie seemed to be an attempt to compete with the Indiana Jones franchise of five films, but really, it was terrible. The first King Solomon’s Mines moving was in 1937 with Paul Robeson, the second in 1950 with Deborah Kerr, and the 1985 movie was the third. Patrick Swayze starred in a 2004 mini series on television, and there was a 2006 tv movie entitled The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mine. That one includes comedians Bob Newhart and Jane Curtain. I’ve not seen the two earliest movies, but I’m assuming each of these attempts had the same difficulty. The story told in the novel is so grand and captivating that the movies have little chance to capture the adventure as it was presented by the author. The book itself was fabulous.