Lay Down Your Heart

This account of a journey for which few predicted a happy outcome before or after it began - with struggles through unforgiving terrain, close encounters with hostile animals, and a disastrous camp fire - has turned out to be not only a full-on survival story but also a rare time-capsule of life in Central Africa in the early era of independence. The author shares his enjoyment of a rich variety of people encountered, from astonished children first seeing white faces to great-grandparents with family memories of Victorian explorers.A fed-up city-dweller s idea of retracing on foot Stanley s 1,200-mile expedition of 1871 originated in his boyhood reading of the American explorer s classic account. Stanley s team had been nearly 200 men; George Tardios s for his equally historic expedition was himself, his wife and a young friend.A diary-based account of a journey accomplished 40 years ago has had to await the author s thorough physical and mental recovery from it, further years earning a living in Tanzania, and self-reinvention in a changed England.