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

presented as an amateur author, whose first statement at the beginning of the book is one of modesty, of being aware of his book’s “shortcomings.” As narrator, Quatermain dithers over lore and legends that he might have included in King Solomon’s Mines had he “given way to [his] own impulses” (p. 7). Authorship as a form of discipline and control is also expressed at the end of the story, when Quatermain announces, “And here, at this point, I think I shall end this history” (p. 207). The reader is reminded that the story does not end by itself; the writer ends it. Control and consciousness were keywords for Quatermain as an author—and quite possibly for Haggard as well.
    Haggard’s protagonist Quatermain describes himself as a 55-year-old man who has survived the job of elephant hunter much longer than most of his colleagues. Quatermain explains at the start of his tale, “I am a timid man, and don’t like violence,” (p. 9) and near the end, after many heroics, he reiterates, “I never had any great pretensions to be brave” (p. 188). Such self-definitions are repeated throughout the book until the narrative itself begins to seem like a means of self-definition. The effort to write, as well as the events narrated, define the narrator.
    There may not be much progression of character in King Solomon’s Mines, but Quatermain rings true precisely because of his lack of grandiose pretensions. Quatermain’s self-deflating tone may include something of Haggard’s own ironic self-regard. When Haggard traveled to Africa in 1914 and his photo was plastered on the local newspaper Natal Witness, Haggard noted in his diary that his image looked “exactly like that of the mummy of Rameses the Second,” a recently disinterred Pharaoh. This lack of vanity or vaingloriousness is unusual in a generation of writers on Africa that included such egomaniacs as Sir Richard Burton, translator of The Arabian Nights.
    At the start of chapter 1, Quatermain informs us: “I am not a literary man, though very devoted to the Old Testament and also to the ‘Ingoldsby Legends’” (p. 9); the latter is an early Victorian compilation of odd and grotesque jokes in prose and verse by Richard Harris Barham (1788-1845). Mention of The Ingoldsby Legends is a running gag throughout the King Solomon’s Mines. Quatermain misattributes lines from Walter Scott to “Ingoldsby” in a jape that resulted in a chiding letter from Robert Louis Stevenson, who thought the error was Haggard’s own, rather than his protagonist Quatermain’s. Reflecting its narrator’s literary tastes, King Solomon’s Mines veers in tone between the Victorian jokes of The Ingoldsby Legends and the sober majesty of the Old Testament. As the story advances, the Bible and The Ingoldsby Legends are repeatedly invoked until they are yoked together in an unlikely identification. During one potentially tragic moment in chapter 6 when Quatermain and his friends are dying of thirst, the narrator decides to read the poem “The Jackdaw of Rheims” from The Ingoldsby Legends (p. 59). Later, at the height of battle, Quatermain states: “Warlike fragments from the ‘Ingoldsby Legends,’ together with numbers of sanguinary verses from the Old Testament, sprang up in my brain like mushrooms in the dark” (p. 148). The disparate texts join as inspiration for the bloodbath to come.
    The influence of the Bible on King Solomon’s Mines can hardly be overstated, starting with the title itself, which honors a biblical monarch renowned both for his wisdom and his wealth. Aside from many explicit references, there are also many biblical allusions, such as when Sir Henry Curtis convinces Quatermain to join the expedition to Africa. Curtis explains that the company will search for his lost brother Neville: “We had quarrelled bitterly, and I behaved very unjustly to my brother in my anger” (p.16). This description echoes the prose cadences of the King James Bible; the