Sunday 7 August 2011

Quote-of-the-Week - Mary Kingsley on Crocodiles

"Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying asleep with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on a steamer and you can write home about it and frighten your relations on your behalf; but when you are away among the swamps in a small dug-out canoe and that crocodile and his relations are awake....- he is highly interesting and you may not be able to write home about him- and you get frightened on your own behalf"
-Mary Kingsley, 1894, published in "Travels in West Africa", 1897- republished in "The Congo and the Cameroons", Penguin Books, 2007.

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