King Solomon's Mines
An elephant hunter is hired to find a lost brother and a legendary diamond mine, and the expedition crosses a desert, a mountain range and a hidden kingdom. Haggard wrote it on a bet that he could produce a better adventure story than Treasure Island, and it sold immediately.
It is a colonial fantasy and should be read as one: the African characters are largely there to assist or threaten the explorers, and the treasure is taken without much ceremony. What still works is the pacing and the invented geography, which is confident enough to have shaped the way later readers imagine the interior.
Public-domain status
First published in 1885. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; H. Rider Haggard died in 1925, so this work has been free to republish there since 1996.
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