Just went to the vid store. I had no idea that a new movie had been made of King Solomon’s Mines! With Patrick Swayze as Alan Quatermain! This might give me a feel for whether I should actually go and read the books… I have heard some dubious things about the worth of H Rider Haggard’s style… the story will hae to be pretty good, I think, to make me go read it. Just looked it up in Wikipedia (my respect for which as a general source of probably-true information has grown recently), and I don’t think I realised that the oldest Alan Q book was published in 1885…