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This is the book that started it all for me back in 1963 when I was 8 years old. At recess while the other children played on the playground I found a bush that I could crawl inside of and be instantly whisked away to Africa. "Treks Across The Veld" was the first of many.
Having long lost that book I recently purchased a copy and just finished reading it for only the second time. What a great story teller is Theodore J. Waldeck. It closes with:
"She is a merciless mother to the unfit, those who can hardly endure. She gives to each one, good and bad, weak and strong, the glories of the night and the day, the sunrise and the sunset, like nothing to be seen anywhere else in the world. She produces children of the mountain and veld with a prodigal fecundity, and she gives them the hardness and the softness of Africa, equally. But she gives them, also equally, of death and destruction, for she must play fair with her children that live on her other children, her own and the adopted ones, like you and me, who understand her, and fight with her, and obey her. There is no mother like her anywhere. It seems to me that here somewhere is the cradle of the living things of all the earth, for in no other place in the world is there so much for one mother to cherish, and punish, and cuff and fondle..."
Having long lost that book I recently purchased a copy and just finished reading it for only the second time. What a great story teller is Theodore J. Waldeck. It closes with:
"She is a merciless mother to the unfit, those who can hardly endure. She gives to each one, good and bad, weak and strong, the glories of the night and the day, the sunrise and the sunset, like nothing to be seen anywhere else in the world. She produces children of the mountain and veld with a prodigal fecundity, and she gives them the hardness and the softness of Africa, equally. But she gives them, also equally, of death and destruction, for she must play fair with her children that live on her other children, her own and the adopted ones, like you and me, who understand her, and fight with her, and obey her. There is no mother like her anywhere. It seems to me that here somewhere is the cradle of the living things of all the earth, for in no other place in the world is there so much for one mother to cherish, and punish, and cuff and fondle..."
