This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Allan Quatermain is H. Rider Haggard's sequel to King Solomon's Mines, and the book in which he deliberately set out to kill his own hero. It opens with the old hunter mourning the death of his only son, a young doctor just beginning a promising career, and confessing that grief has left him with nothing to do but go back to Africa and be killed.
That is how Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good find him: they are looking for Sir Henry's younger brother George, who vanished in the interior with a companion named Neville, and they want Quatermain to guide them. With the Zulu warrior Umslopogaas, the comic French cook Alphonse, and a missionary's household behind them, the party crosses the desert and the great swamp, survives a Masai ambush, and comes out into Zu-Vendis — a hidden nation of white sun-worshippers ruled by two sister queens, the gentle Nyleptha and the proud, dark Sorais.
Quatermain's arrival sets the two queens at each other's throats. Sorais raises the country in rebellion, Sir Henry's love for Nyleptha becomes the pretext for civil war, and the little expedition is swept into a battle it never chose. The last third of the book is Haggard at his most brutal and most elegiac: the storming of the pass, the defence of the temple stair where Umslopogaas fights until his axe falls from his hand, Sorais' suicide, and Quatermain's own quiet death, recorded in a closing chapter written by another hand.
