Four Faces of Siva ~ 1929 ~ London: George Harrap & Company or IN: Bobbs-Merrill ~ 373 pages, bw plates 
The Detective Story of a Vanished Race

The book discusses many aspects of the ancient Khmer culture. The Khmer were a group of mostly Buddhist people in Cambodia. This book talks about the religious and symbolic stories surrounding the creation and founding of  their great cities in the Cambodian jungle. A definite strength of this book is that it is written like a fable. The narrative way the book is composed gives the reader a very colorful picture. The book also contains many illustrations of ancient artifacts, religious symbols, royal terraces, etc., found in the cities. The illustrations are particularly helpful in gaining a clear picture of the story. For a person who is not extremely familiar with ancient Cambodia the pictures make it fairly easy to get a firm grasp on what the author is saying. Casey's story telling places emphasis on animism, ghosts, and ancestral reverence to the tiger and the elephant. Religious beliefs and gods seemed to be very important to the Khmer people. There are many aspects of the story of the Khmer which emphasize strong religious powers.Although the book does have many strong points, Casey does sound a bit racist. When he makes reference to the people and their traditions he sometimes describes them in seemingly patronizing terms. For example, describing the conical hats worn by the local people as "lampshades" or referring to the ancient Khmer as "small-eyed people who worshipped snakes," may give the impression that his analysis is biased by racial overtones. But the information is good and useful, as long as the overtones are overlooked. Such comments seem comical, but tend to sound condescending, rather than funny.Though this book was published in 1934, which dates the maps and the illustrations and photographs. This book is ideal for someone who is looking to gain a greater knowledge of the Khmer culture in ancient Cambodia, but does not want to read dry, boring text. The narrative tone makes The Four Faces of Siva very enjoyable to read, but the reader must be careful to take the biases of the times with a grain of salt.
http://mcel.pacificu.edu/as/students/khmer/book.html
The ancient tale of the vanished Khmer Empire, shrouded in mistery and covered by the jungles of Southeast Asia, the splendor of Angkor Wat, this book reads like a detective story about the search for a nation that has vanished from the earth.

OTHER:
When We Were Both Younger ~ 1952 ~ Humorous and readable account of life and people in Chicago between the years 1890 and 1910
Battle Below ~ 1945 ~ Stories from WWII submarine warfare which were written in 1943 and held up by Navy censors until after the war. Hair-raising tales of risk and survival doing battle beneath the waves. 
Torpedo Junction: With the Pacific Fleet from Pearl Harbor to Midway
We saw one of the most tremendous melodramas in the record of great military institutions unfold itself, scene by scene, act by act, in strict conformity to the rules of unity and plot. We saw the Navy---flattened not only by the Pearl Harbor tragedy but by the global war that grew out of it---suddenly setting out to do whatever could be done with what materials happened to lie at hand, going ahead with ever-increasing momentum, gathering up material and men as it moved and fought, out guessing Admiral Yamamoto and his talented knifemen with traditional American brilliance, striking cautiously at first, then with daring---through the Marshalls and Gilberts and Wake and Marcus to the ornate shambles of the Coral Sea. And finally, out-numbered and out-gunned, to the incredible victory of Midway." 

Robert J. Casey takes you along, step by step, day by day, even minute by minute, through this great drama of recoil, recovery and counterattack, through these breath-taking encounters that answered superbly the nervous query "Where is the fleet?" He reached the Pacific battle scene just after the Japs had made Pearl Harbor their "torpedo junction." He walked in on as terrible a morning-after as the United States has ever known. His fleet slipped in filth, the stench of burned oil was in his nostrils, knotted iron and scrap lay all about and on Red Hill were 3500 new graves to be avenged. Hawaii was hysterical, wondering why it hadn't been finished off when the Japs had a chance that would never come again. For weeks it went on, the turmoil, the rebuilding, the restless waiting. You realize suddenly the months, perhaps years, of careful planning that preceded that Jap sneak attack, you realize why the United States could not risk lightning retaliation. You wait as Honolulu rebuilds and speculates with nightmarish intensity on what's coming next. And then, at last, American action. Aboard a heavy cruiser, with a compact task force of fighting ships and planes, Casey watches the men of the Navy prepare for battle. Days pass. Out of the quiet Pacific come more American forces, to converge on the Jap base of Wotje. In a few breathless hours the Japs are smashed. Casey records the first American score from start to finish. Things are not done so neatly and completely at the bombing of Wake, but at Marcus, that dot on the far eastern sea, the Navy attacks with the calm of veterans. Again, the relentless and wearing preparation pays big dividends, as the Japs wilt under our fire.  Stories of the fighting in the Macassar Straits come in. With Casey's cruiser you swing down toward the Coral Sea, scene of portentous conflict.  But this is only prelude to one of the greatest naval battles of all time---Midway. With smaller forces, divided but working with deadly co-ordination, the Americans attack unhesitatingly a great Jap concentration bent on repeating their success at Pearl Harbor. It is an overwhelming victory for the United States that Casey reports from the deck of his cruiser, a victory in which no ship fires at another ship, a victory from the air that yet is truly a naval victory.  With him you live through those harrowing hours when American planes give the Japs the licking of their lives, sink their fighting ships, their carriers, their transports. He believes it the beginning of the end of the war in the Pacific, a far, far, greater blow to Japan than Pearl Harbor was to us, a grand American "torpedo junction." 
 

Prince Michael, next in succession to the throne, comes to inform the prince of the possible political complications resulting from his scandalous behavior. Discovering that Victoria has his crown, Caryl falls in love with her; she learns of his identity; but her note, revealing her own identity, is intercepted by Michael. Caryl abdicates in order to marry his American sweetheart; then, perceiving the plot, he returns to Paris, heartbroken. Following the abdication of Stefan, however, Caryl abducts Victoria, and they escape via carriage, automobile, and airplane. 

OTHER:

The Bath Comedy by Agnes & Egerton Castle ~ Frederick A. Stokes, New York  1900
The Secret Orchard. 1901
My Merry Rockhurst, Being Some Episodes in the Life of Fiscount Rochhurst, a Friend of King Charles the Second, and  at One Time Constable of His Majesty's Tower of London. NY: MacMillan, 1907 ~ Wroth.
Schools and Masters of Fencing by Egerton Castle
Gutenberg Editions
Wikipedia Entry
IMDB Reference
e-Texts at Online Books Library

1902 Book Ad

Castle studied at the Lycee Condorcet in Paris until 1873, then attended the University of Glasgow, spent a year at King's College in London, and was graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, where his work had been concentrated in the natural sciences. After briefly studying law at the Inner Temple, he enrolled in the military academy at Sandhurst, obtained lieutenancy in the Second West India Regiment, and later went on to serve as captain in the Royal Engineer Militia.

After military service, he "turned naturally to literature," as he was quoted as saying in a New York Times interview of October 19, 1901, because he "had always been thrown with literary people, and all my training had been in that line." From 1885 to 1894 Castle wrote articles, reviews, and criticism for the Saturday Review. In 1885 he published an authoritative history of swordsmanship, Schools and Masters of Fence, and in 1891 produced his first novel, Consequences. This "study," he told the New York Times interviewer, "of the psychic experiences of a young man who returns to England after having spent his youth on the Continent" was "to some extent autobiographic, but only as regards atmosphere, not incident."

Most of his later novels were written in collaboration with his wife, Agnes (Sweetman) Castle, a sister of the novelist Francis Blundell. The first of their stylish historical romances, The Pride of Jennico, the story of an English aristocrat who inherits a princedom in Moravia, was such a huge popular success that it led to others including The Bath Comedy, a tale of intrigue set in the famous watering spot, its sequel The Incomparable Bellairs, and at least one novel a year for the rest of their lives. Several of their joint efforts were dramatized; in America David Belasco produced Sweet Kitty Bellairs, based on The Bath Comedy, to wide acclaim.

In his New York Times interview Castle explained his preference for romantic rather than realistic fiction. "You can't go around taking notes on life and call that literature. You must idealize life, put imagination and the heroic, blood-stirring qualities into it before it becomes literature." Of his work as a collaborator, Castle indicated in the Critic that, before beginning a novel, he needed first to establish its locale and scenery "either in old memories or in freshly sought impressions," while his wife dwelt "almost exclusively on the spring of the purely human element." Though her method might "seem antithetical to mine, strangely enough it never clashes, and our joint unravelling of tangled tales always proceeds in harmony."

Although their work achieved popular success, it sometimes met with an impatient critical reception. Of The Wind's Will, the Times Literary Supplement reviewer wrote, "Mr. and Mrs. Egerton Castle go plodding on. . . with the same old themes, the same old technical merits, and the same old too obvious limitations." But of John Seneschal's Margaret, published shortly after Castle's death, L. M. Field in the New York Times of November 14, 1920 wrote, "the book with which Egerton Castle has bidden us farewell is not only artistically worthy of one who loved and respected his art but contains a depth and richness of feeling far beyond that of the blithe tales preceding it." Castle died at his home in Hindhead, Surrey. Agnes Castle survived him by two years.
http://cres1.lancs.ac.uk/~esarie/farnol/messages/1356.htm
 

OTHERS
Gutenberg Editions

In 1925 she explained that she did not want to become too identified with the West, for "using one setting all the time is very like planting a field with corn season after season. I believe in rotation of crops. If the public ties me down to the cornfield too much I'm afraid I'll leave that scene entirely." And leave she did, to write novels set in Michigan, the American Southwest, and Quebec. Cather's themes, too, changed during this period, as she turned from the passion of individuals aspiring to greatness and began writing of compassion of ordinary people who, confronting mortality, seek comfort in the human family. In the end, Cather returned to her earliest memories to write again of Nebraska and, in her last book, of Virginia. But unlike the sunny themes of her early novels drawn from childhood memories, "Lucy Gayheart" and "Sapphira and the Slave Girl" are Gothic stories in which dark passions break through the apparent calm of everyday lives. For during her final years Cather felt the horror of events leading to another world war, the pain over deaths of family and friends, and the frustration from an inflammation of her hand that meant an inability to write. But she also maintained old friendships and enjoyed new ones, most importantly with the Menuhin children; and she continued to write, publishing short stories (e.g. "The Best Years") and working on an Avignon novel that remained unfinished at the time of her death. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 24, 1947. Cather's life is remarkable for the faith that she kept -- to her family; her friends (she lived with Edith Lewis for thirty-eight years); her first editor, Ferris Greenslet, at Houghton Mifflin; her publisher, Alfred Knopf, to whom she went following "My Antonia" and with whom she remained the rest of her life; and most of all to her art. As her biographer James Woodress has written, she lived "a literary life," with "a single-minded dedication to the pursuit of art" (Willa Cather: A Literary Life, xvi). Awards came to Cather during her life time -- honorary degrees from numerous universities, the Pulitzer Prize for "One of Ours," a medal by the American Academy for "Death Comes for the Archbishop," and the gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters for a writer's lifetime achievement. Following her death, her reputation has grown steadily and, in the last fifteen years, exploded with activity, with over a hundred articles and several books appearing each year on her. In 1990 "A Lost Lady" was included among the Encyclopedia Britannica's "Great Books of the Western World," and Cather is now widely recognized as a major American writer, and our country's foremost woman writer. But more telling than such accolades, Willa Cather's novels have never gone out of print, for her popular following has remained strong. So the explosion of critical recognition means only that the experts have realized what her readers have known all along -- that Willa Cather's novels and stories, in such apparently simple style, provide companionship for a lifetime.

Biography
Born Wilella Siebert Cather in 1873 on a small farm in the Back Creek valley near Winchester, Virginia. Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather (d. 1928), whose family had lived on land in the valley for six generations. Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak (d. 1931). Mary had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie. In 1883, Cather moved with her family to Catherton in Webster County, Nebraska. The following year the family relocated to Red Cloud, the county seat. Cather spent the rest of her childhood in the town which she later made famous by her writing career. When Willa Cather insisted on attending college, her family borrowed money for her to attend the University of Nebraska.

While in college, Cather became a regular contributor to the Nebraska State Journal. Later she moved to Pittsburgh. After receiving a job offer from McClure's Magazine, she moved to New York City for her career. McClure's Magazine serialized her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, a work heavily influenced by her admiration for the style of Henry James. Cather was born into a Baptist family, but in 1922 joined the Episcopal Church. After moving to New York, she began to attend Sunday services in the Episcopal Church as early as 1906. Cather died on April 24, 1947 in New York City of a cerebral hemorrhage and was buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

Writing career
Cather moved to join the editorial staff of McClure's and in 1908 was promoted to managing editor. As a journalist, she co-authored, alongside Georgina M. Wells, a critical biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. It was serialized in McClure's in 1907-8 and published the next year as a book. Christian Scientists were outraged and tried to buy every copy.The Syracuse Herald, Sat. Eve. 2 Mar 1907, Pg 7, Col 5-7 The work was reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 1993.In 1942 cather moved out In New York Cather met a variety of authors. Sarah Orne Jewett advised her to rely less on the influence of Henry James and more on her own experiences in Nebraska. For her novels, Cather returned to the prairie for inspiration and also drew on her experiences in France. These works became both popular and critical successes.

In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, published in 1922. This work had been inspired by reading her cousin G.P. Cather's wartime letters home to his mother. He was the first officer from Nebraska killed in World War I. Those letters are now held in the George Cather Ray Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. Cather was celebrated by critics like H.L. Mencken for writing in plainspoken language about ordinary people. When novelist Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he paid homage to her by saying that Cather should have won the honor. Later critics tended to favor more experimental authors. In times of political activism some attacked Cather, a political conservative, for writing about conditions of ordinary people, rather than working to change them.

Personal life
As a student at the University of Nebraska in the early 1890s, Cather sometimes used the masculine nickname "William" and wore masculine clothes.  A photograph in the University of Nebraska archives depicts Cather, "her hair shingled, at a time when long hair was fashionable, and dressed boyishly." 

Throughout Cather's adult life, her most significant relationships were with women. These included her college friend, Louise Pound; the Pittsburgh socialite, Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled to Europe; opera singer Olive Fremstad; and most notably, the editor Edith Lewis. Cather's sexual identity remains, however, a point of contention amongst scholars with many arguing for Cather as a lesbian and interpreting her work through a lens of queer theory while a highly vocal contingent of Cather scholars adamantly oppose such considerations.

Professor Janet Sharistanian has written, "Cather did not label herself a lesbian nor would she wish us to do so, and we do not know whether her relationships with women were sexual. In any case, it is anachronistic to assume that if Cather's historical context had been different, she would have chosen to write overtly about homoerotic love." 

Cather's relationship with Lewis began in the early 1900s. The two women lived together in a series of apartments in New York City from 1912 until the writer's death in 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived at No. 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. They had to move as the apartment was to be taken down during construction of the Seventh Avenue subway line. Lewis later served as the literary trustee for the Cather estate. In her later life, Cather spent summers on Grand Manan Island, in New Brunswick, Canada, in the Bay of Fundy, where she owned a cottage in Whale Cove.

A resolutely private person, Cather destroyed many old drafts, personal papers, and letters. Her will restricted the ability of scholars to quote from those personal papers that remain. Since the 1980s, feminist and other academic writers have explored Cather's sexual orientation and the influence of her female friendships on her work. Most recently, her work has been viewed at the vanguard of Ecocriticism, a contemporary theoretical approach to the analysis of art that seeks out ecological awareness. Cather received many honorary degrees, beginning with a doctorate from the University of Nebraska in 1917. She also received degrees from University of Michigan, Columbia, Yale, California-Berkeley, Princeton, (the first to receive an honorary degree) and Smith College. [

Legacy
Cather received both national and state honors. In 1973, the United States Postal Service honored Willa Cather by using her image on a postage stamp. In 1981 the U.S. Mint created the Willa Cather medallion, a half-ounce gold coin. Willa Cather half-ounce gold coin.Cather was elected to the Nebraska Hall of Fame. In 1986, Cather was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. Her alma mater, the University of Nebraska, named residence halls after both Cather and her college friend, Louise Pound. Pound had a lifelong career as professor of English at the university and was the first woman president of the Modern Language Association. The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation (now the Willa Cather Foundation) was founded in 1955 to support the study of her life and work and the maintain many sites in her hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska.

Wikipedia Reference
 

Other
The Story of Tonty 18891899 A.C McClurg ~ Illustrated
A Strange Wedding: (Craque O'Doom)
The Spirit of an Illinois Town 1897 Houghton Mifflin Publishers, Riverside Press.
Heroes of the Middle West 1898 Ginn and Company, The Athenaeum Press.
Biography of Mary Hartwell Catherwood by M. L. Wilson 1904, written after Ms. Catherwoods death.
Online eText Editions
Old Caravan Days
The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World

Auctioned at Heritage Auctions with the following note:
"From the Library of Edgar Rice Burroughs
George Catlin. The North American Indians. Being Letters and Notes on Their Manners, Customs, and Conditions, Written During Eight Years' Travel Amongst the Wildest Tribes of Indians in North America, 1832-1839. Edinburgh: John Grant, 1926. With the bookplate of fantasy author and Tarzan creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs affixed to each pastedown. Two octavo volumes. With 320 illustrations (most color), engraved from the author's paintings. Publisher's decorative maroon cloth, elaborately titled and stamped in gilt and black. Both volumes a bit over-opened in a few places, else a near fine copy. Estimate: $1,500 - up. "

OTHER:
Indian Paintings: A Guide to his Online Art Exhibits

OTHERS
Explorations in Equatorial Africa (1861)
A Journey to Ashango-Land (1867)
Stories of the Gorilla Country (1867) New York: Harper & Brothers
Wild Life under the Equator (1868) New York: Harper & Brothers - with numerous engravings
Lost in the Jungle (1869) New York: Harper & Brothers. 
My Apingi Kingdom (1870)  New York: Harper & Brothers
The Country of the Dwarfs (1871) New York: Harper & Brothers ~ Many Illustrations
The Land of the Midnight Sun (1881)
The Viking Age (1889).

Shooting a Leopard

African Forest

Du Chaillu and Quengueza

Since the first appearance of Tarzan of the Apes in All-Story magazine, Edgar Rice Burroughs has been criticized and even ridiculed for having described tigers (native to Asia) in Africa. Research will show, however, that early African settlers used the term "tiger" to describe any large cat.

Interestingly, the word "tiger," is used in the article 1889 Geographic article reprinted at ERBzine 0872. The author of that article says that the tiger was one of the animals in South Africa.  He probably meant leopard, but it is quite possible that ERB was influenced by this.
 

Early life
In his youth he accompanied his father, a French trader in the employment of a Parisian firm, to the west coast of Africa. Here, at a station on the Gabon, he was educated by missionaries, and acquired an interest in and knowledge of the country, its natural history, its natives, and their languages.

Africa
He was sent in 1855 by the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia on an African expedition. Until 1859 he explored the regions of West Africa in the neighborhood of the equator, gaining considerable knowledge of the delta of the Ogowe River and the estuary of the Gabon. During his travels from 1856 to 1859 he observed numerous gorillas, known to non-locals in prior centuries only from an unreliable report by Hanno the Navigator of Carthage in the 5th century BC, and known to scientists in the preceding years only by a few skeletons. He brought back dead specimens, and presented himself as the first white person to have seen them.

A subsequent expedition, from 1863 to 1865, enabled him to confirm the accounts given by the ancients of a pygmy people inhabiting the African forests. Du Chaillu sold his hunted gorillas to the Natural History Museum in London and his "cannibal skulls" to other European collections. (A fine cased group shot by du Chaillu may be seen in Ipswich Museum in Suffolk, England.) Narratives of both expeditions were published, in 1861 and 1867 respectively, under the titles Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, with Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the Chace of the Gorilla, Crocodile, and other Animals; and A Journey to Ashango-land, and further penetration into Equatorial Africa. While in Ashango Land in 1865 he was elected King of the Apingi tribe.

At the time, he was in great demand on the public lecture circuits of New York, London, and Paris. Although there were initial challenges of his accounts, they came be accepted, although Encyclopedia Britannica speculated that "possibly some of the adventures he described as happening to himself were reproductions of the hunting stories of natives."

Northern Europe
After some years residence in America, during which he wrote several books for the young founded upon his African adventures, du Chaillu turned his attention to northern Europe. After a visit to northern Norway in 1871, over the following five years he made a study of customs and antiquities in Sweden, Norway, Lapland and Northern Finland. He published in 1881 The Land of the Midnight Sun (dedicated to his friend Robert Winthrop of New York), as a series of Summer and Winter Journeys, in two volumes.

His 1889 work The Viking Age (also in two volumes) was a very broad study of the early history, manners, and customs of the ancestors of the English-speaking nations. He labored for eight and a half years and carefully read hundreds of Sagas that describe the life of the people who inhabited the Scandinavian peninsula from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages (including literary remains). This scholarly work demonstrates what is now generally recognised, the importance of the Norse, including Norway, Sweden, and Denmark to the cultural dimension and transformation of British Isles during the fifth to eleventh centuries. This view was then unfamiliar and was ridiculed by Canon Isaac Taylor. This book (in two volumes) is now a very collectible item. In 1900 he also published The Land of the Long Night.

He died following a stroke of paralysis at St. Petersburg, while on his way home from Russia. He is interred under an unusual grave marker at Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, NY.

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The National Geographic Magazine
July 1903 issue: Volume 14, Number 7, pages 282-285. 

About 1853 his father took him back to the United States, but the wild tales the boy had heard had fascinated him and excited him to find out how much was true of what the seacoast natives said of the cannibals, pygmies, wildmen or gorillas, and other marvels of the Great Forest. No white man had previously penetrated more than a few miles into the interior along this part of the coast.

In the fall of 1856 he sailed from New York in a three-masted schooner and was landed at Gabon in December. The following three and one-half years he passed exploring a section of Africa stretching from Gabon 320 miles inland and 250 miles north and south. On his return to New York in 1859 he wrote the story of his discoveries, which was published by Harper & Brothers in 1861 under the title of Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa; with Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the Chase of the Gorilla, Crocodile, Leopard, Elephant, Hippopotamus, and other Animals. By Paul B. Du Chaillu, with Map and Illustrations. Harper & Bros., 1861. In his preface he states: "I traveled - always on foot, and unaccompanied by other white men - about 8,000 miles. I shot, stuffed, and brought home over 2,000 birds, of which more than 60 are new species, and I killed upwards of 1,000 quadrupeds, of which 200 were stuffed and brought home, with more than 60 hitherto unknown to science. I suffered fifty attacks of the African fever, taking, to cure myself, more than fourteen ounces of quinine. Of famine, long-continued exposures to the heavy tropical rains, and attacks of ferocious ants and venomous flies, it is not worth while to speak. My two most severe and trying tasks were the transportation of my numerous specimens to the seashore and the keeping of a daily journal, both of which involved more painful care than I like even to think of."

In the book he told of gorilla, of which he had brought back the first specimens and which he had been the first white man to see and hunt; of the fierce cannibal tribes, the Fans, who filed their teeth to keep them sharp; of the ravages of the Baskouay ants, which marched in dense columns miles in length, and who were marshalled by officers and generals; of hunting elephants with pitfalls; of a new variety of snake, less than four feet long and six and eight inches thick, which lies in the open places in the woods and whose bite is instantaneous death, and of many other equally wonderful sights.

The book was greeted with shouts of laughter and derision from one end of the American continent to the other. Mr and Mrs and Miss Gorilla was the common jest, and the name Du Chaillu became a byword for a fanciful storyteller. Du Chaillu was only 26 when his first book was published. He was unable to answer satisfactorily the storm of questions hurled at him; consequently nobody believed him, except Harper and Brothers in the United States and the Royal Geographical Society in England, both of whom valiantly and vigorously defended his truthfulness.

In 1863-'65 Du Chaillu made a second journey of exploration to Africa, the narrative of which appeared in 1867 as "A Journey through Ashango Land." This time he discovered the pygmies of the Dark Forest, but his descriptions of the little people were likewise received with incredulity. With this journey his explorations in Africa ended.

Gradually each of Du Chaillu's discoveries was confirmed by later explorers - by Schweinfürth, Stanley, Sir Harry Johnston, and others. Many years ago they were all verified; but the name Du Chaillu none the less still remains to most Americans that of a romance. In a certain sense Du Chaillu is himself responsible for this feeling, for all his descriptions are so vivid and are so thrillingly told that the reader feels he is reading a work of pure invention, rather than a narrative of actual experience.

His famous description of the first gorilla shot by a white man is worth quoting: "Suddenly, as we were yet creeping along, in a silence which made a heavy breath seem loud and distinct, the woods were at once filled with the tremendous barking roar of the gorilla. Then the underbrush swayed rapidly just ahead, and presently before us stood an immense male gorilla. He had gone through the jungle on his all-fours; but when lie saw our party he erected himself and looked us boldly in the face. He stood about a dozen yards from us, and was a sight I think I shall never forget. Nearly six feet high (he proved four inches shorter), with immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms, with fiercely-glaring, large, deep gray eyes, and a hellish expression of face, which seemed to me like some nightmare vision: thus stood before us this king of the African forest. He was not afraid of us. He stood there, and beat his breast with his huge fists till it resounded like an immense bass-drum, which is their mode of offering defiance; meantime giving vent to roar after roar.

"The roar of the gorilla is the most singular and awful noise heard in these African woods. It begins with a sharp bark, like an angry dog; then glides into a deep bass roll, which literally and closely resembles the roll of distant thunder along the sky, for which I have sometimes been tempted to take it where I did not see the animal. So deep is it that it seems to proceed less from the mouth and throat than from the deep chest and vast paunch.His eyes began to flash fiercer fire as we stood motionless on the defensive, and the crest of short hair which stands on his forehead began to twitch rapidly up and down, while his powerful fangs were shown as he again sent forth a thunderous roar. And now truly he reminded me of nothing but some hellish dream creature - a being of that hideous order, half-man, half beast - which we find pictured by old artists in some representations of the infernal regions. He advanced a few steps, then stopped to utter that hideous roar again; advanced again, and finally stopped when at a distance of about six yards from us. And here, just as he began another of his roars, beating his breast in rage, we fired and killed him."

In later years Du Chaillu traveled extensively in Sweden, Norway, Lapland, Finland, and other countries. He was the originator of the phrases "Land of the Midnight Sun" and "Land of the Long Night." In 1889 he published "The Viking Age," his most ambitious work, the result of many years of special research. He published his first book for young people in 1868, called [p. 285] "Stories of the Gorilla Country." This was followed by many other similar books.

Mr Du Chaillu had many friends among the members, of the National Geographic Society. His last public address in the United States was before the National Geographic Society, April 12, 1901, on the occasion of a farewell reception tendered him by the Society on the eve of his departure for Russia. His first lecture on his return was to have been before the National Geographic Society.

OBITUARY
click

Obituary: Paul Belloni du Chaillu, 
The Geographical Journal,
Vol. 21, No. 6 (Jun., 1903), pp. 680-681

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