King Solomon's Mines Read Online Free PDF

War I in 1914. During the war, he would travel again to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. By the war’s end his chronic bronchitis had developed into emphysema. By the mid-1920s he was fighting what he called in a diary entry “a losing battle with pain, weakness, and depression.” Operated on for an abscess, he did not recover, and he died on May 14, 1925. His grave is in Ditchingham, a small town in Norfolk, England, where he has been honored with a street named after him, Rider Haggard Way. In St. Mary’s Church, Ditchingham, a stained-glass window that pays tribute to Haggard includes images of his farm in South Africa and of the Egyptian pyramids. Carved in marble, above a vault containing his remains, are the words:
    Here lie the ashes of Henry Rider Haggard
Knight Bachelor
Knight of the British Empire
Who with a Humble Heart Strove to Serve his Country.
    Later generations of readers have retained their affection for the author of King Solomon’s Mines. In The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951), the noted British novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991) praises the “poetic elements” of Haggard’s books, which according to Greene “live today with undiminished vitality.” The great British critic and literary historian George Saintsbury (1845-1933) ranked King Solomon’s Mines alongside Treasure Island and stated he wished he had written “the fight between Twala and Sir Henry.” Other adventure writers from Haggard’s era, including A. E. W. Mason, Stanley Mason, Anthony Hope-Hawkins, and H. B. Marriott-Watson are in the oubliettes of literary history, whereas Haggard’s best books have remained in print continuously since they first appeared.
    King Solomon’s Mines has been translated into African languages (among its dozens of foreign editions). Its Portuguese translation was done by the eminent novelist and short-story writer José Maria Eça de Queirós (1845-1900). Eça de Queirós was no slouch—Émile Zola called him “greater than Flaubert”—and by translating Haggard into Portuguese in 1891 (as As Minas de Salomão), he added to the European prestige of the book. Perhaps most curiously, King Solomon’s Mines has been abridged and edited for wide use not just as a text for learning English as a foreign language in Africa, China, and elsewhere, but also for young readers.
    Authors as diverse as C. S. Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, and Gilbert Murray fell under the spell of Haggard’s adventure stories. Today, the British writer John Mortimer continues to pay wry tribute to Haggard in the popular series of mystery stories featuring a British barrister, Rumpole of the Bailey. The aging Rumpole refers to his daunting wife with affectionate irony as “She Who Must Be Obeyed,” a takeoff of Haggard’s She novels. Despite the unamusing ways in which parts of Haggard’s books have dated, most readers still feel affection for King Solomon’s Mines and She.

Targets of Loathing
    Haggard did not single out Africans for despising, according to the informative Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire, by Wendy R. Katz. His other novels and private writings also express disdain for “Jews, communists, trade unionists, Irish, Quebecois, and Indian nationalists.” Jews and Communists, according to Katz, were the special targets of Haggard’s loathing, far more than any other category of people, and as he aged, the intensity of his hatred increased. Although not present in King Solomon’s Mines, Jews are portrayed unattractively in She, The World’s Desire, The People of the Mist, and others among Haggard’s novels. In later private writings, Haggard blamed the Russian Revolution on Jews, and after the Romanov family was killed by the revolutionary forces, Haggard noted with extreme bigotry in his diary for 1920: “The tendency of the Jew to torture before he kills is a curious indication of his character which apparently has not varied since the days of