African Adventures

From the Foreword:

African Adventures has been written mainly in response to the request of those friendly readers of my previous book, African Buffalo Trails, who asked for more fare of a similar nature. These were the readers who joined me on one of the branch roads of adventure which took us to the Kivu, the Ituri Forest and the Ubangi—the native haunts of the gorilla, the pygmy and the cannibal.

In the present volume we return to the main road which starts in the desolate Karoo country and leads through the Kalahari Desert, the Back Congo, and on to the Lupa Goldfield in Tanganyika, where some of the strangest characters imaginable become fellow travellers. It is here that we meet a motley crowd, drawn from every strata of society, and the search for the elusive yellow metal takes us, on a black and eerie night, to the grave of an old native queen where a hoard of gold lies buried beside her.

On another side road we accompany the world’s most fantastic snake-man and see him capture and take bites from the deadly mamba and cobra. In the dense forest of the cannibal we sit at night and listen to the savage drummers sending out their messages, which we interpret successfully.

On Christmas Eve we sit around the camp-fire in the vast open plains and sing Christmas carols with the blacks whilst the music is provided by a celebrated artist. On yet another night we sit and listen to intimate stories about the most famous hunters who have passed over the African hunting scene. And once again we share adventures on the trail of the lion, the elephant, and the buffalo.

Although to some extent biographical, the adventures I have recorded here are not in chronological order, but I have presented them in a sequence which I hope will afford pleasure and excitement to readers as they follow me on the many different trails.