King Solomon’s Mines

“King Solomon’s Mines peerless above all”

The Spectator, 18 December 1926

• Complete text of Cassell’s 1887 printing, checked against the page images
• Nine plates newly drawn after Walter Paget’s illustrations of 1887
• Haggard’s dedication, publisher’s note, author profile and afterword
• Every departure from the 1887 printing listed at the end of the book

Far beyond the familiar roads of southern Africa, where the desert gives way to mountains that no living traveller has crossed and returned to describe, an ancient map points towards a forgotten kingdom and the fabulous treasure once attributed to King Solomon. For generations the secret has lain undisturbed, guarded by distance, by the silence of the dead, and by dangers of which the map itself can give no warning.

Allan Quatermain, hunter, trader and veteran of the African wilderness, has lived too long among its perils to surrender readily to legends. Yet when Sir Henry Curtis seeks his help in finding a brother who has vanished beyond the mountains, the old hunter agrees to undertake a journey more formidable than any he has known. Accompanied by the indomitable Captain Good and the mysterious Umbopa, the expedition advances across burning deserts and snowbound heights into a country where ancient regiments march beneath the banners of rival kings, where loyalty is purchased with blood, and where the struggle for a throne will demand more of the strangers than any quest for riches.

Beyond the last frontier of the known world, courage, ambition and friendship are brought to their severest trial, while beneath the mountains the legendary treasure awaits those who have survived long enough to reach it. Yet the greatest discoveries of the journey may prove to be those for which no map has prepared them.

First published in 1885, King Solomon’s Mines stands among the founding masterpieces of lost-world adventure, establishing an imaginative tradition that would endure through generations of literature and into the great adventure films of the modern age.

This AETERNUS edition preserves the early textual state of Cassell’s 1887 printing, accompanied by nine illustrations newly drawn after Walter Paget.

AMBER SERIES · AETERNUS

AMBER SERIES annotated edition: the text of Cassell’s 1887 printing (fifty-third thousand) with publisher’s note, afterword and nine plates newly drawn after Walter Paget.