As Minas De Salomão
1885
There is a map drawn in blood and speculation. There is a silence on the African plateau where every explorer who came before has vanished. And there is Allan Quatermain, a middle-aged hunter with a quiet hunger for one last great adventure, who agrees to lead two English gentlemen into the unknown in search of King Solomon's legendary mines. What follows is a ruthlessly efficient expedition into danger. A frozen corpse on a mountain. A civilization ruled by a tyrant named Twala. Wars fought with spears and courage. And finally, the mines themselves, glittering and vast, holding secrets older than empire. Quatermain narrates his own tale with the dry detachment of a man who has seen too much to be astonished, yet he cannot fully mask his wonder at what they find. Published in 1885, this is the novel that birthed the adventure genre. It influenced everything from Indiana Jones to Huckleberry Finn. Its prose is Victorian, its politics are of their time, but its pulse is timeless: the need to see what lies beyond the next horizon, even when that horizon wants to kill you.
