THE AFRICAN JUNGLE

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 98, 27 April 1935, Page 24

THE AFRICAN JUNGLE

AN ADVENTURER'S TALE

"I am a man whom no place or set of circumstances can satisfy for long," Mr. Courtney tells us at.the beginning of "Africa Calling." Those who read his story to the end, as most will do, may readily believe him. Mr. Courtney is a born adventurer in the exact sense of the word; he delights in pushing on into unknown parts. Unexpected incidents, sudden danger, narrow escapes are as the breath of life to him. He would not be at all happy working in a bank. The story starts with the author at the age of 21; he, throws up his job as a ranger on a timber concession to join in a gold rush. "Gold! There were loads of it—lumps as big as your fist! I was damn near crying." He thus describes his feelings when the party come on what they believe to be their first strike. They are disillusioned and push on. In the end Mr. Courtney is the only one left of a party of three; the other two have had to quit on account of fever. He does not quit; he stays on alone for another nine months. Only when his reports to his colleagues become filled with references to'little men in bowler hats sitting on trees do they go in and bring him out delirious with malaria. His next job is working for a contractor clearing virgin bush in the Great Rift Valley. He is in charge of sixty men of the Wagishu tribe. The Wagishu are cannibals. The contractor for whom Mr. Courtney is working gets in arrears with pay. The Wagishu down' tools and go off to see the local District Commissioner. When they return, Mr. Courtney calls them to a conference; he tells them it is too bad they have had no pay, but says that he has had none either. He then orders the whole sixty to lie down and has them soundly flogged. After this work proceeds smoothly. Mr. Courtney says: "My success was due to the respect which the natives had for me." i His accounts of native "black magic" (by this time he has become "a freight hound," having acquired a motor-truck and set himself up as a local Carter Paterson) are highly interesting. White men who have been in Africa themselves will read what he has to say with particular attention. Mr. Courtney believes in native "black magic"; so do other white men. ,- The characters Mr. Courtney meets in his wanderings are of a quality to make the mouth of any novelist water. One cannot invent such people. There is the elephant poacher. "Why don't yer go in for a man's game, like what I'm at? Look at the money there's in it. Freightin' cotton an' stuff—Sissy, I call it!" This old-timer, who chalked his initials on the rump of a wild elephant, an act which Mr. Courtney describes as. the most foolhardy he knows, met his death on an elephant's tusk in the end. Mr. Courtney rates elephant hunting as responsible for by far the greatest number of deaths among hunters; he gives the average ivory hunter five or six years before being killed or badly maimed: He says that the nervous, keyed^up big-game hunter is the hunter who lives longest.