Author: A. St. H. Gibbons

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-06-02

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9781330023815

Excerpt from Africa, Vol. 1 of 2: From South to North, Through Marotseland Although the first or introductory chapter of these volumes contains sufficient prefatory matter to acquaint the reader with the objects and organisation of the expedition under discussion, a short supplementary preface written on the eve of publication may not be regarded as waste of space. Fortunately in the book of travel popular notions do not demand any very high order of literary art. The leniency of the public in this direction is no doubt in a measure due to the fact that the exigencies of an explorer's life largely deprive him of the absorbing interests of the library and the study. Yet the pen is inseparably bound up with the more strenuous exertions in the field, unless indeed discovery and a knowledge of the more inaccessible parts of the earth are to remain a mere matter of selfish and personal interest. To write an account of such an expedition as that which it was my good fortune to control from 1898 to 1900 is not in itself a difficult task. The difficulty arises with the necessity to confine the description within reasonable limits - to decide how much of the personal element may with advantage be discarded, and how much is necessary to convey to the reader a clear picture of the countries traversed, the characteristics of the tribes encountered, and the general conditions which the future traveller may expect to share with the author. Thus a few days' experience will in places be found to absorb a whole chapter, while in other instances three or four hundred miles are disposed of in almost as many words. As in my previous book, so in these volumes little allusion is made in the text to astronomical and other observations. In my view these are as much out of place in what may be called the narrative of a book of travel as is the repeated detailed discussion of matters of every day occurrence by which some authors import monotony into otherwise interesting works. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.