'King Solomon's Mines'

Some pieces of art need to placed in context. It makes a bit more poetic.

Consider that not only was travel abroad only for the insanely rich, slaves or those in the military or that a vast, vast amount of the planet had actually been fully explored, the idea of going abroad in a book, for a nickel or penny or however much books cost at the time, was probably the closest most people came from seeing the African plains, the jungles of Asia, the tombs of Egypt or the mystery of South America.

In 1885, when H. Rider Haggard started an entirely new genre of literature, the Lost World, with King Solomon's Mines, surprisingly, most of the world had been at least "found." Meaning, colonized. The Germans, Dutch, British and French had massive holdings in Africa, South America, North America and Asia. In fact, explorers had gotten bored and was looking for ways to getting to the poles and up the highest peaks.

Still, the interiors of these lands were still a mystery (think Joe Conrad and The Heart of Darkness). There's still parts of the Amazon river basin still unexplored. There's still allegedly parts of the Appalachian Mountains in the United State still unseen by outsider's eyes. The Valley of the Kings would be soon discovered in Egypt and the secrets of the Assyrian empire were being dug up. The rich culture and history of the colonized people around the world suddenly had a lot of depth and people wanted to know more. The sun might have rose and set on the British empire, but time started elsewhere.

Here you had Haggard bringing it all, based on real accounts, real people and somewhat real adventures (perplexing natives by taking out false teeth was a real trick played on the poor souls of Africa), all of which sparked an entire genre from H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Burroughs and all those crazy adventures novels that would follow. Let's face it, there's no Indiana Jones without Allan Quatermain.