Adventure stories, especially those pulpy treasure hunting myths, are a guilty pleasure of mine. Over the weekend, I completed Haggard's novel King Solomon's Mines while also watching the first three Indiana Jones films - the latter two with my wife, in her first viewing unbeknownst to me.
All of these works capture a person's imagination in so many ways by depicting dark continents and foreboding omens that block the path to untold fortune and glory. Given that, we should see so much more entertainment like this - thoughtful, creative, exhilarating. Yet we don't. Our sense of adventure seems to have dissipated with a fading love for history, and with the world seeming smaller now than at the time period of the works I re-visited.
