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.