Striking Gold (King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard
Date:	14/08/01 (156 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Exciting and inventive.

Disadvantages: Can't think of any.

If H. Rider Haggard wasn't one of those George Orwell characterized as "good bad writers" - and very likely he was - he definitely should have been. Orwell meant by that the writers who are compelling despite their faults, or even perhaps because of their faults. They aren't perfect technicians or grammarians or stylists, but they come near to perfection as story-tellers.

Though not all the time. Not all of Haggard's book have lasted very well, but at least two of them will probably survive as long as popular literature does. Those two are *She* and *King Solomon's Mines*, which is the story of three white men who discover an ancient black African kingdom that once supplied the diamonds, gold, and ivory to King Solomon. Although Haggard is startlingly modern in his attitude to other races, who supply his heroes and villains just as readily as the whites do, he still presumes that blacks could not have been capable of high civilization, and the novel is based on speculation about the ruins of old Zimbabwe, which Europeans in the nineteenth century thought were evidence of ancient Hebrew or Egyptian conquests in southern Africa.

That aside, the book is a realistic one, with far less outright fantasy in it than *She*, and it's more a book that you live than that you dream. The memories that you will carry away almost as though they were from your own experience will include a flesh-parching desert journey, epic, almost Homeric battles, a living entombment, and a witchhunt that curdles almost as much blood as it spills. The hunt is conducted under the beady gaze of Gagool, who is one of the greatest and most original villains of nineteenth-century. She slips onto the stage unobtrusively; one might almost say deceptively:

At length the door of the hut opened, and a gigantic figure, with a splendid tiger-skin karross flung over its shoulders, stepped out, followed by the boy Scragga, and what appeared to us to be a
withered- up monkey, wrapped in a fur cloak. [Chapter 9, "Twala the King"]

But Gagool is neither a monkey nor, in the evil she can do, at all withered-up, as the same chapter speedily demonstrates:

I observed the wizened monkey-like figure creeping up from the shadow of the hut. It crept on all fours, but when it reached the place where the king sat, it rose upon its feet, and throwing the furry covering off its face, revealed a most extraordinary and weird countenance. It was (apparently) that of a woman of great age, so shrunken that in size it was no larger than that of a year-old child, and was made up of a collection of deep yellow wrinkles. Set in the wrinkles was a sunken slit, that [sic] represented the mouth, beneath which the chin curved outwards to a point. There was no nose to speak of; indeed, the whole countenance might have been taken for that of a sun-dried corpse had it not been for a pair of large black eyes, still full of fire and intelligence, which gleamed and played under the snow-white eyebrows, and the projecting parchment-coloured skull, like jewels in a charnel-house. As for the skull itself, it was perfectly bare, and yellow in hue, while its wrinkled scalp moved and contracted like the hood of a cobra. ... The figure ... suddenly projected a skinny claw armed with nails nearly an inch long, and laid it on the shoulder of Twala, the king, and began to speak in a thin, piercing voice: ... '*Blood! blood! blood!* rivers of blood; blood everywhere. I see it, I smell it, I taste it - it is salt; it runs red upon the ground, it rains down from the skies ... Blood is good, the red blood is bright; there is no smell like the smell of new-shed blood. The lions shall lap it and roar, the vultures shall wash their wings in it, and shriek in joy ...'

Gagool is in fact the witch-finder generalissima of the hidden black kingdom into which three white men and their black "servant" have ventured, cla
ims with unsettling plausibility to be more than three centuries old, and will be a central part of scenes that a single reading will suffice to keep with you for life. Forget the various bad movies made from *King Solomon's Mines*: the book, with *She*, has deservedly kept its popularity and fame, and Gagool, to employ a common post-modernist device, comes on like a cross between a black female Machiavelli, a superannuated Margaret Thatcher, and a Wicked Witch of the West. On speed. And then some.

Summary: