The Twentieth-Century Sportsman ¹

Abstract

THIS amazing picture-book (recommendable, among a hundred other reasons, in that, though large in size, it is very light to hold in the hand) will probably faire école. That it has made a sensation amongst the reading public interested in Africa is already observable by the reviews of it which have appeared in the leading newspapers, and the vogue it has attained in spite of the conflicting interest of current politics. This is little to be wondered at. The author (who is the brother of the Captain W. R. Dugmore who distinguished himself in Uganda and elsewhere as a soldier-pioneer) had, no doubt, supreme good luck, but he and his companion, Mr. James L. Clark, were also possessed of singular courage and skill both as photographers and marksmen, and, if need be, mechanicians. Good luck gave them the chance of a telephotograph of Kilimanjaro, eighty miles distant, which is one of the weirdest mountain pictures the present writer has even seen, and confirms his old story of twenty-five years ago that Kilimanjaro, in certain aspects, resembled Swift's floating-island of Laputa. Amongst other episodes of singular good fortune was the photographing of the still very rare black Forest pig. This creature, the existence of which was rumoured by Stanley, George Grenfell, and the present writer in the Congo Forests, was actually first revealed to science by Captain Meinertzhagen and Mr. C. W. Hobley, far away from the Congo basin, on the Nandi plateau and round Mount Kenia (though it was soon afterwards obtained from the north-east Congo, and finally from the Cameroons). But specimens of it are still scarcer than those of the okapi, and to have photographed the creature, wild and in its forest home, is an episode that probably Mr. Dugmore never anticipated, even in his rosiest anticipations.