Of Diamonds and Deities: Social Anthropology in H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines

Of Diamonds and Deities: Social Anthropology in H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines Gerald Monsman University of Arizona EVERYONE KNOWS that the trio in King Solomon's Mines (1885) went to Kukuanaland for its diamonds; the rescue of Sir Henry's brother served only as a convenient pretext for recovering Solomon's treasures, the objective of the lost George Curtis in the first place. The wisest and richest of biblical rulers, Solomon would have provided the strongest moral sanction for the Victorian resumption, as it were, of mineral extraction on the dark continent. When Haggard's adventurers arrive at "a vast circular hole with sloping sides, three hundred feet or more in depth, and quite half a mile round," Quatermain asks: "Can't you guess what this is?" I said to Sir Henry and Good, who were staring in astonishment down into the awful pit before us. They shook their heads. "Then it is clear that you have never seen the diamond mines at Kimberley. You may depend on it that this is Solomon's Diamond Mine; look there," I said, pointing to the stiff blue clay which was yet to be seen among the grass and bushes which clothed the sides of the pit, "the formation is the same."1 His allusion to the Kimberley "Big Hole"—Anthony Trollope had called it "the largest and most complete hole ever made by human agency"2— connects mining activities in southern Africa in the 1870s-1880s to a biblical antecedent in the mythopoeic Africa of Solomon's legend. Although the setting of Solomon's mines derived from nineteenth-century maps showing stone ruins near Victoria in Mashonaland (Zimbabwe), discovered and explored 1868-1871 by Renders and Mauch, contemporary exploration and the politics of diamond mining were not the only formative influences on Haggard's romance.3 Imperial rule had opened primitive societies to investigations of cultural history; and, although 280 MONSMAN : HAGGARD set in a strange land where the marvelous abounds, King Solomon's Mines is indebted to current Victorian anthropological thinking, though Haggard doubtless absorbed his ideas unsystematically. Haggard described his method of romance-writing as "swift, clear, and direct," purged of "dark allusions": "such work should be written rapidly and, if possible, not rewritten, since wine of this character loses its bouquet when it is poured from glass to glass."4 Had he read Ezra Pound's discussion of imagery in "Vortex," written only two years after this pronouncement, he at least might have given more credit to the artistry of that spontaneous imagistic "bouquet." Haggard's writing has powerful affinities with dreams or with such early psychoanalytic devices , even, as Rorschach tests, tapping lapsed memories and subliminal impressions. At the climactic moment in King Solomon's Mines, the trio is illuminated in the dimming lamp: "Presently it flared up and showed the whole scene in strong relief, the great mass of white tusks, the boxes full of gold, the corpse of poor Foulata stretched before them, the goatskin full of treasure, the dim glimmer of the diamonds, and the wild, wan faces of us three white men seated there awaiting death by starvation."5 Quatermain observes that "wealth, which men spend all their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing at the last."6 Despite Haggard's predilection for "grip" in romance writing, one cannot dismiss this "scene" as simply the climactic moment of suspense before the escape. Nor is Quatermain 's sudden insight into the valuelessness of London diamonds merely melodramatic depression. In a 1905 Canadian speech, Haggard cited this specific passage to assert that the commercial and technological wealth of urban life is valueless apart from an Antaeus-like contact with the land and its fertility.7 Like the native, the European must go to the land, must discover the natives' wealth, not in the form of diamonds but as a power of rebirth, renewal. This is the fundamental mythopoeic hook on which Haggard hangs his heroic quest. Haggard's return from Africa to England followed upon the retrocession of the Transvaal, which he felt to be a "great betrayal" of settlers and natives alike by the Gladstone government.8 He found England by...