Fiction · 1919
When the World Shook
Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot
Three companions shipwrecked on a remote Pacific island stumble on a hidden chamber where an ancient priest-king and his daughter Yva have lain in suspended animation for two hundred and fifty thousand years, since the fall of a vanished antediluvian civilization — and their awakening forces both the islanders and the modern world beyond to answer for what has, and has not, actually been learned since.
H. Rider Haggard published When the World Shook in 1919, in the middle of his own long string of "lost world" adventures beginning with King Solomon's Mines, but written in the shadow of the First World War and carrying an openly skeptical, war-chastened view of human progress that sets it apart from his earlier, more purely adventurous romances.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.
Contents
- Dedication
- 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
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1856–1925 · Victorian
Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) was born in Bradenham, Norfolk, and went out to South Africa at nineteen on the staff of the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal, witnessing the British annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 and later farming ostriches there before returning to England to study law. King Solomon's Mines (1885), reportedly written on a wager with his brother that he could not write a novel as good as Treasure Island, was an immediate sensation and established the "lost world" adventure novel as a genre; She (1887) and Allan Quatermain (1887) followed, and Haggard returned to the character of Allan Quatermain across some eighteen further books over the next four decades. Away from fiction he wrote extensively on agriculture and rural welfare, served on royal commissions on land settlement and coastal erosion, and was knighted in 1912 for this public service. He died in London at sixty-eight.
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