@Surrey? Upper New @York? @Canada? @Mexico? Or is it totally different from anything, as is the Grand Canyon? When you look out from your camp -- any one camp -- how far do you see, and what do you see? Do you see mountains in the distance, or a screen of vines or bamboo near hand, or what? When you get up in the morning, what is the first thing to do? What does a rhino look like, where where does it live, and what did you do the first time one came at you? I don't want you to tell me as though I were either an old hunter or an admiring audience, or as though you were afraid somebody might think you were making too much of the matter. I want to know how you REALLY felt. Were you scared or nervous? Or did you become cool? Tell me just how it was, so I can see the thing as happening to a common everyday human being. Then, even at second-hand and at ten thousand miles distance, I can enjoy it actually, humanly, even though I'm not there. And I can imagine a bit as to how I would have liked it myself.
Obviously, to write such a book the author must at the same time sink his ego and show honestly his personality. The conflict in this is all too real. He must forget either to strut or to blush with nervousness. Neither audience should be forgotten, and neither should be addressed by itself. Never should he lose sight of the wholesome fact that old hunters are to read and to weigh. Never should he for a moment slip into the belief that he is justified in addressing the expert alone. His attitude should be that many men know more and have done more than he, but that for one reason or another these men are not ready to share their knowledge and experience.
To set down the creation of an ideal is one thing: to perform it is another. No one knows better than I how limited my African experience is, both in time and extent. It was confined to East Equatorial Africa and a year. Hundreds of men are better qualified than myself to write my story. But unfortunately they will not do it.
