King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard

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One day, adventurer and hunter Allan Quatermain receives a commission that is too intriguing to pass up: journey north from South Africa into the unexplored interior of the continent and retrieve—if possible—his patron's lost brother. But this is no ordinary search-and-rescue operation, as the brother went missing in search of the fabled mines of the biblical King Solomon.

For the entirety of the journey, Quatermain and his party have their resolve tested and their ingenuity tried from every angle: the elements, the inhabitants, and the internal stress all threaten to pull the group apart at the seams.

Though Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World is usually the first to mind when thinking of examples of the "lost world" genre, Haggard's King Solomon's Mines predates Doyle by almost 30 years, and neatly carved out a space in the emergent genre.