King Solomon’s Mines

King Solomon’s Mines, novel by H. Rider Haggard, published in 1885. One of the first African adventure stories, it concerns the efforts of a group of Englishmen to find the legendary diamond mines of King Solomon. The explorer Allan Quatermain agrees to take Sir Henry Curtis and a friend on an expedition deep into the interior of Africa to find Curtis’s brother, who disappeared while searching for the mines. After suffering the inhospitable terrain and surviving a tribal war, they find the mines and manage to escape with some of the diamonds. On the way home they find Curtis’s brother alive but injured.