ABSTRACT

The story of Baker’s advance into Central Africa reads like an epic. It has for its heroes the two Bakers, uncle and nephew, Abd-el-Kader, the Muslim, Mansur, the Copt, and every man of that élite corps known to immortality as the “Forty Thieves”. It has its heroine in the incomparable Lady Baker, as beautiful as she was brave, clinging like ivy to her husband and shooting as straight as an American roughrider. It has its martyr in Higginbotham, its villains in Ahmed Agad, Abu Saud, and Kabba Rega, and its brigands become saints in Wat-el-Mek, Alloron, and Ferritch Ajoke. It abounds in unexpected incidents, narrow escapes, and dramatic climaxes. It tells how hippopotamuses charged at steel boats and overturned sloops, how crocodiles lay in wait for their human victims and captured them, and how white ants issued from the ground in the winged state and were pursued by myriads of white storks. The enthralling interest of the story is multiplied a hundredfold by the fact that this Aeneas requires no Virgil, for Baker writes his own epic.