When the World Shook

by H. Rider Haggard

Overview

If H. Rider Haggard--one of the greatest adventure writers of all time--is remembered now, it is for his novels featuring Allan Quatermain, a heroic adventurer whose exploits in Africa form the most important sequence of Haggard's books. Quatermain's adventures are chronicled in such novels as King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quaterman, She, and 11 others.

In When the World Shook, Haggard takes his popular formula for Victorian adventure fiction into the contemporary world, with this tale of three modern-day English adventurers who find an ancient god (complete with beautiful daughter)
asleep beneath a South Seas volcano....

Written late in his life, When the World Shook is perhaps the most current of all of Haggard's novels; it features many contemporary inventions, from aeroplanes to cameras, as well as Haggard's trademark gripping storytelling and likeable, sympathetic characters.

"His tales remain powerfully in the memory..."
--The Encyclopedia of Fantasy

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592240500
Publisher:	Borgo Press
Publication date:	08/02/2024
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

H. Rider Haggard was a popular English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, including King Solomon's Mines (considered one of the first of the Lost World genre) and She. When The World Shook, which features suspended animation and a machine capable of changing the tilt of the earth, is the most science-fictional of his writings.

James Parker was born in London in 1968. He is the author of Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Read an Excerpt

Think of them! The unmeasured space of blackness threaded by those globes of ghastly incandescence that now hung a while and now shot upwards, downwards, across, apparently without origin or end, like a stream of meteors that had gone mad. Then the travelling mountain, two thousand feet in height, or more, with its enormous saucer-like rim painted round with bands of lurid red and blue, and about its grinding foot the tulip bloom of emitted flame. Then the fierce-faced Oro at his post, his hand upon the rod, waiting, remorseless, to drown half of this great world, with the lovely Yva standing calm-eyed like a saint in hell and watching me above the edge of the shield which such a saint might bear to turn aside the fiery darts of the wicked. And lastly we three men flattened terror-stricken, against the wall.

Nightmare! Imagination! No, these pale before that scene which it was given to our human eyes to witness.

And all the while, bending, bowing towards us — away from us — making obeisance to the path in front as though in greeting, to the path behind as though in farewell; instinct with a horrible life, with a hideous and gigantic grace, that titanic Terror whirled onwards to the mark of fate.

Table of Contents

Chapter I. Arbuthnot Describes Himself

Chapter II. Bastin and Bickley

Chapter III. Natalie

Chapter IV. Death and Departure

Chapter V. The Cyclone

Chapter VI. Land

Chapter VII. The Orofenans

Chapter VIII. Bastin Attempts the Martyr's Crown

Chapter IX. The Island in the Lake

Chapter X. The Dwellers in the Tomb

Chapter XI. Resurrection

Chapter XII. Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand Years!

Chapter XIII. Oro Speaks and Bastin Argues

Chapter XIV. The Under-world

Chapter XV. Oro in His House

Chapter XVI. Visions of the Past

Chapter XVII. Yva Explains

Chapter XVIII. The Accident

Chapter XIX. The Proposals of Bastin and Bickley

Chapter XX. Oro and Arbuthnot Travel by Night

Chapter XXI. Love's Eternal Altar

Chapter XXII. The Command

Chapter XXIII. In the Temple of Fate

Chapter XXIV. The Chariot of the Pit

Chapter XXV. Sacrifice

Chapter XXVI. Tommy

Chapter XXVII. Bastin Discovers a Resemblance

NOTE By J. R. Bickley, M.R.C.S.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

If this is pulp fiction it’s high pulp: a Wagnerian opera of an adventure tale, a B-movie humanist apocalypse and chivalric romance. When the World Shookhas it all — English gentlemen of leisure, devastating shipwrecks, volcanic tropical islands inhabited by cannibals, ancient princesses risen from the grave, and if that weren’t enough a friendly, ongoing debate between a godless materialist and a devout Christian. H. Rider Haggard’s rich universe is both profoundly camp and deeply idealistic.—Lydia Millet

Editorial Reviews

"If this is pulp fiction it's high pulp: a Wagnerian opera of an adventure tale, a B-movie humanist apocalypse and chivalric romance." - Lydia Millet

From the Publisher