Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers by Wilbur Smith

Author:Wilbur Smith [Smith, Wilbur]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Adventure, Thriller, Suspense, Mystery, Adult, Action & Adventure, General, Literary Criticism, Sea Stories, Historical, Fiction, Modern
Publisher: Pan
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Daniel had spent every day that week at the Reading Room of the British Museum. This was invariably his practice before leaving on an assignment. In addition to books specifically on Ubomo, he asked the librarian for every publication that she could find on the Congo, the Rift Valley and its lakes, and the African equatorial forest.

He started with the books of Speke and Burton, Mungo Park and Alan Moorehead, re-reading them for the first time in years. He skipped through them rapidly, merely refreshing his mind on the half-forgotten descriptions of the nineteenth-century explorations of the region. He moved on to the more recent publications. Amongst these he found Kelly Kinnear’s book, The People of the Tall Trees, listed in the bibliography.

He called for a copy of her book and studied the author’s photograph on the inside of the dust-jacket. She was rather pretty, with a strong and interesting face. The blurb did not give her birth date but it listed her honours and degrees. She was primarily a medical doctor, although she also had a PhD. in Anthropology from Bristol University. When not conducting research in the field, Doctor Kinnear shares a cottage in Cornwall with two dogs and a cat. That was the only personal information that the blurb contained and Daniel returned to the photograph.

In the background of the photograph was a palisade formed by the trunks of large tropical trees. It seemed as though she stood in a forest clearing. She was bare-headed, dark hair pulled back from her face and twisted into a thick plait that had fallen forward over one shoulder and hung down her chest. She wore a man’s shirt. It was difficult to tell what her figure was like, but she seemed slim and small-breasted. Her neck was long, with clean graceful lines, and her collar-bones formed a sculptured cup at the base of her throat.

Her head sat well on the column of her neck, strong square jaw and high cheekbones like an American Indian. Her nose was thin and rather bony and her mouth was determined, perhaps obstinate. Her eyes were probably her best feature, wideset and almond-shaped, and she stared coolly at the camera. He judged that she had been in her early thirties when the photograph was taken, but there was no indication as to how old she was now.

A handful, Daniel decided. No wonder she has my friend Tug running scared. This is a lady who gets her own way. He flicked through to the first dozen pages of People of the Tall Trees, and read the introduction in which Kelly Kinnear explored the first references to the pygmies in the writings of antiquity.

This began with the report of the Egyptian leader Harkbuf to his child-Pharaoh Neferkare. Two thousand five hundred years before the birth of Christ, Harkhuf had led an expedition southwards to discover the source of the Nile river. In his field report, discovered four and a half thousand years later in Pharaoh’s tomb,

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