Set in Africa..............the lost city of Zinj...........like the late Mike C. novel............they are looking for something................Africa.............Zulu................oh boy.....................

between six^[13] and sixteen^[14] weeks between January and 21 April 1885. However, because the book was a complete novelty, it was rejected by one publisher after another. When, after six months, King Solomon's Mines finally was published, the book became the year's best seller; the only problem (much to the chagrin of those who had rejected the manuscript) was how to print copies fast enough.^[12]

In the process, King Solomon's Mines created a new genre, known as the "Lost World", which would inspire Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King^[15] and HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. Lee Falk's The Phantom was initially written in this genre. A much later Lost World novel was Michael Crichton's Congo, which involves a quest for King Solomon's lost mines, supposedly located in a lost African city calledZinj.