'The Maneaters of Tsavo'

Amongst my collection of 'precious possessions' which have been trailed around the world are a number of books. This one which, sadly, lost its dust cover long ago, is one of my favourites.

For anyone who hasn't read it, it is a story of extraordinary courage - or blind foolhardiness - of how an engineer, J. H. Patterson, fresh out from Scotland, set about killing two lions which had brought the construction of the Mombasa-Nairobi railway to a standstill by eating the workforce.

It is set in the thoroughly unfashionable age of expanding Empire but there is much more to the book than the story of a white man killing lions, because the human story is timeless.

Along with another precious book, 'The Long Grass Whispers', previous post here - it was bought for me by my mother when she was visiting her sister in Southern Rhodesia in 1952 - the sticker from Christian's bookshop is visible at bottom left. My mother wrote 'Jonathan Haylett' on the flyleaf but I later added my address in Mombasa, my aunt's address in Fulham, where I spent the Christmas and Easter holidays from my English prep school, and my school, Glengorse.

I haven't read the book in some years but this picture, which shows the beds of some of the construction workers fixed in a tree to protect them from the maneaters, obviously stuck in my mind, for I wrote a short story about it. The story failed to elicit any interest but it was an attempt to imagine the sheer horror felt by someone sitting in thick darkness knowing that, out there, a few yards away, killer is watching them.