Diego Rivera Portrait of Natasha Zakolkowa Gelman painting

Diego Rivera Portrait of Natasha Zakolkowa Gelman painting
Vincent van Gogh The Starry Night painting

Summary
King Solomon's Mines was written by Haggard in conscious rivalry with Stevenson's Treasure IslandWE had killed nine elephants, and it took us two days to cut out the tusks and get them home and bury them carefully in the sand under a large tree, which made a conspicuous mark for miles round. It was a wonderfully fine lot of ivory. I never saw a better, averaging as it did between forty and fifty pounds a tusk. The tusks of the great bull that killed poor Khiva scaled one hundred and seventy-pounds the pair, as nearly as we could judge.
As for Khiva himself, we buried what remained of him in an ant-bear hole, together with an assegai to protect himself with on his journey to a . It was intended, in the author's own words, to be "a book for boys". Published in 1886, Cassell's the publishers drew on the enthusiasm of early readers' reports and launched it with hype only repeated in the latter half of the twentieth century. On vast posters and in narrow type were emblazoned the words "KING SOLOMON'S MINES - THE MOST AMAZING BOOK EVER WRITTEN". Put up in the dark, people leaving for work could not escape the message in the morning and the book subsequently became a phenomenal success (see Higgins' book Rider Haggard for more details on that advertising coup). Improbable and therefore fable-like, the story tells of English travellers who penetrate a remote African country, the site of a vanished empire with predictably