Motherhood Quote by Richard H. Davis

Adventure here is staged as both seduction and alibi. Richard H. Davis dangles "King Solomon's Mines" like a shiny prop from popular fiction, borrowing H. Rider Haggard's imperial fantasy to varnish the unknown with instant glamour. The move is savvy: it recruits his reader's imagination before the hard realities of the Congo can intrude. Those "great mountains" become a curtain line between ordinary life and a promised world of treasure, danger, and self-mythology.

Then the sentence pivots into something more intimate and revealing: "advance work for mother". Davis is not only writing to the public; he's negotiating domestic accountability. The phrase "entering wedge" is bluntly strategic, as if absence is a door that must be pried open gently, with rhetoric. It's a small masterpiece of self-exoneration: he casts his impending disappearance as inevitable, even dutiful, a plan being responsibly introduced rather than a choice that will hurt.

The subtext is the late-19th-century romance of vanishing into empire, where the colonial frontier doubles as a masculine escape hatch. "Disappearing from sight for years and years" is both boast and confession: the thrill of being unmoored, and the need to narrate that unmooring as destiny. In the Congo specifically, that fantasy sits on dark ground. Readers then might have heard whispers of exploitation; Davis keeps the lens trained on mountains and mines, not on what powers the expedition. It's promotional copy with a family address baked in, a journalist practicing the oldest trick: turning a morally complicated place into a personal story about longing and freedom.