text: Now, I enjoy Victorian adventure fiction as much as the next person -- in fact, probably more than the next person, since the average "next person" hasn't ever read any. Tales of derring-do, adventures to unexplored distant lands, lost civilizations, great artifacts, etc. -- that's all good stuff. What's not good is this book, which is tedious in the extreme. On the surface of it, Haggard's followup to his hugely successful (and infinitely better) "King Solomon's Mines" has all the elements: a dynamic duo of scholar-adventurers (one of whom is descended from pharaohs!), a mysterious message from the past delivered by a dying man, an expedition to Africa, and a supernatural being who knows the secret of eternal life.
  
  However, despite this promising laundry list, Haggard's execution leaves a great deal to be desired. A friend described it rather aptly as "a book with a lot of story, but not a lot of plot." Which is to say that in my edition, some 320 pages are filled without much happening. There is the initial mysterious set-up, the journey to dark Africa with the usual physical trials and tribulations, the heroes' conveyance to the "lost city", and then... and then things kind of grind to a halt. Lengthy descriptive details, lengthy internal ruminations, lengthy rambling speeches, lengthy everything -- but very little of consequence occurs until the very end, when the heroes make a dangerous journey to find the eternal fire which grants nigh-everlasting life.
  
  I suspect much of the problem stems from the book's origin as a long-running serial in the Gazette. As I understand it, serial writers of the time were paid by the word or by the installment, and thus, it was to their advantage to spin their plots out as much possible -- hence the unhealthy ratio of action to words. Judicious editing could reduce the book to 1/3 of its size without any loss of note. Of course, as another friend pointed out, it's probably best to read the book is small chunks -- just as one would have done with installments. Spreading out one's reading of it over a period of time, he suggests, may serve to conceal the book's rambling nature. In any event, there are some nice scenes here and there, such as the moonlight battle between crocodile and lion and another involving human cadavers used as torches, but those are about all I'm likely to recall from this book in a year. 
  
  Of course, as is noted in the introduction to my edition, Haggard lifted the main elements of the plot, and even the the true name of "She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named", from several earlier adventure novels by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, so one can't even give him much credit for imagination. I suppose the book is worth reading by those interested in literary representations of the prevailing xenophobic sentiments of Victorian Englishmen: racism, anti-Semeticism, misogyny, fear of miscegenation, etc., but as entertainment for the modern reader, it falls woefully short of the mark.
  