The story of King Solomon's Mines takes place in the mid-nineteenth century, a period roughly contemporary with Haggard's own lifetime. The cities, rivers, landmarks, and tribes mentioned in the story are all real, though at the time, little was known about this part of southern Africa. The fact that Africa was relatively unexplored increased readers' interest in the story. Many readers in fact took the book as an actual account of the author's adventures, a view which was encouraged by Haggard's direct and realistic prose.

Haggard's narrative is filled with interesting details about the African environment. To evoke the difficulty of the adventurers' journey across the wilderness, he tells us of the "dreadful tsetse fly, whose bite is fatal to all animals except donkeys and men." Of the twenty oxen with which they had begun their expedition, only twelve remained: "One we had lost from the bite of...