King Solomon's Mines (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free Page A

Rudyard Kipling, like “Gunga Din”: “It was ‘Din! Din! Din! / ’Ere’s a beggar with a bullet through ‘is spleen.’”
    Haggard applies European history—and not just English prosody—to Africa by having Captain Good, a friend of Sir Henry Curtis, refer to the murderous King Twala as “just like a black Madame Defarge” (p. 110). The French Revolutionary character Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is ferociously vengeful and knits the names of her intended victims. Yet in King Solomon’s Mines Quatermain and his party, not Africa and King Twala, are, in their plot to overthrow a cruel king, the real revolutionary participants. This curiously layered simile is typical of the complexity and contradictions of King Solomon’s Mines.
    Women too are treated roughly in King Solomon’s Mines. Quatermain informs the reader almost casually that “women bring trouble as surely as the night follows the day” (p. 119). Shortly after this misogynistic statement, murder is described as a kind of symbolic rape, when the young maiden Foulata is threatened with ritual execution by a leering aggressor who taps his spear and cries, “She shrinks from the sight of my little plaything even before she has tasted it” (p. 121).
    King Solomon’s Mines reflects an awareness of what may be called the Eros of otherness. In a running gag repeated ad nauseum, Captain Good’s bare white legs are the objects of admiration for Africans who “satisfy their aesthetic longings” (p. 127) by staring at them, as Quatermain puts it with heavy ironic humor. Descriptions of Kukuana women fall into racial stereotypes: “the lips are not unpleasantly thick as is the case in most African races” (p. 88). Umbopa is described as a “tall, handsome-looking man, somewhere about thirty years of age, and very light-coloured for a Zulu” (p. 35). Haggard accepts the racist notion that lighter skin is handsomer than dark, and Africans are most beautiful when they look less African and more European in appearance.
    Even beautiful Africans are not described in any great admiring detail. Umbopa gets only a passing reference about a period of famine during which he wore “a leather belt strapped so tight round his stomach ... that his waist looked like a girl‘s” (p. 67). This mild observation scarcely has the erotic charge of the words describing a dead athlete who wears a “garland briefer than a girl’s” in A. E. Housman’s “To An Athlete Dying Young,” in his classic 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad. Some critics have written about homoerotic aspects of King Solomon’s Mines, but in truth they are difficult to find.
    Still, the descriptions of sexuality in King Solomon’s Mines have attracted much critical comment. One critic even noted that H. Rider Haggard and Sigmund Freud were born in the same year, 1856. Thus, when Haggard is described by other critics as “pre-Freudian,” this is not strictly true. Extra-Freudian or Super-Freudian might be a more apt term, as Haggard’s directness in sexual matters almost makes Freudian interpretation seem obsolete.
    Instead of being buried in the unconscious, sexuality is right on the surface in Haggard’s world, as in the map leading to King Solomon’s Mines, which names mountains known as Sheba’s Breasts that are on the way to the treasure (p. 22). An accompanying text supposedly written in 1590 by the Portuguese adventurer José da Silvestra when he was “dying of hunger,” also refers to “the north side of the nipple of the southernmost of the two mountains I have named Sheba’s Breasts” (p. 23). Da Silvestra adds that any future treasure seeker must “climb the snow of Sheba’s left breast till he comes to the nipple” (p. 23). In Victorian England, where in sitting rooms, piano legs were prudishly covered by rugs and referred to coyly as “limbs,” this frank description of female body parts must have been powerful. The impact must have