Written in a time when Africa seemed infinite and largely unexplored, at least from a Western point of view, Haggard’s classic adventure novel created a template still followed today—the Indiana Jones films owe a huge debt to Haggard, for example. Adventurer Allan Quatermain agrees to search for a man who went missing while seeking the titular mines in exchange for a share of any treasure found, and encounters hidden kingdoms and terrible dangers—the latter being more or less a requirement of the genre.