About this audiobook
Don Ignatio's account draws an English companion, James Strickland, into a journey connected with a hidden city in Central America. The city known as the Heart of the World carries meanings that extend beyond treasure or discovery. For Ignatio, its possibilities are bound up with hopes for the future of Indigenous people living under outside domination.
H. Rider Haggard places adventure within a network of loyalties, inherited symbols and political ambitions. The travellers must interpret the intentions of people whose interests differ from their own. What seems to promise renewal can also provoke rivalry, making access to a hidden place only the beginning of the story's uncertainty.
The novel explores friendship, authority and the risks within a vision of collective restoration. Its lost-world setting belongs to imaginative fiction, inviting readers to follow a hazardous expedition while noticing how the desire to recover a meaningful past can become entangled with decisions about power in the present.
