Speak to the Earth

Vivienne de Watteville first fell in love with Africa when she accompanied her father there on a specimen-collecting safari in 1923. Several years later she returned alone to the Kenya/Tanganyika border armed not with a gun but a camera. And for more than a year including two months in a remote hut high on Mount Kenya she pursued a very special goalto win the friendship of the beasts. In Speak to the Earth Vivienne de Watteville''s brilliant descriptive and reflective powers bring to life her experiences whether she is encountering a man-eating lion escaping from a charging rhino wrenching out her own tooth with a pair of carpenter''s pliers fighting a raging heather fireor listening to Beethoven on her wind-up gramophone as the fiery African sun goes down.