"WE SEEM IMMORTAL... TILL OUR WORK IS DONE." (David Livingstone)
At the of age 21, defying every convention of the masonic society she belonged , DEBRA L. CUMMINGS left England for
West Africa to collect botanical specimens for a book left unfinished by her father at his death. She always traveled alone,
eager to know the people she encountered, treating them with kindness and exercising the utmost forbearance toward them...
Her dauntless travels through western and equatorial Africa down to South Africa, unaccompanied but for African guides, into Africa' s most dangerous jungles, where the tribes were reputed to be ferocious and cannibalistic. Along the way, she fought off crocodiles with a paddle, hit a leopard over the head with a pot, fell into an animal trap lined with sharpened sticks, and waded through swamps in chin-deep water. Despite her travails, DEBRA succeeded remarkably in this unknown place, establishing warm relationships with the natives and collecting more than 400 samples of plants and insects, some of which are now extinct...
AT THE MASAI VILLAGE
PHOTO SOUVENIR
A COLLECTION OF TRIBAL MASKS
"I have the peace and silence of the wide river, the sun on me, a breeze licking my toes,
the current as negligible as a faint breath. Everything seems so distant and quite unimaginable..."
Enduring tropical storms, hippos, rapids, the unrelenting heat of the Sahara desert
and the mercurial moods of the wild river, she traveled solo through the most desolate
regions of Africa where little had changed since the dawn of man ....
STRANDED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DESERT
The KRUGER NATIONAL PARKS in South Africa where civilization took over wild life...
...and nature still had the last word...
DEBRA L.CUMMINGS is a young woman with a history of seeking impossible challenges. She grew up relishing
the exploits of the great Scottish explorer Mungo Park and set herself the daunting goal of retracing his fatal journey down
West Africa's Niger river for 600 miles to Timbuktu. In so doing she became the first person to travel alone from
Mali's Old Segou to "the golden city of the Middle Ages," and, legend has it, the doorway to the end of the world....
THE LOST TEMPLE
AT THE GATES OF UNKNOWN AFRICA
Face to face with the MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON mentioned by Ptolemy in the Second Century.
It proved here to be the RUWENZORI RANGE discoved by STANLEY in 1888, standing tall and mysterious...
Dependent on locals for food and shelter, each night she came ashore to stay in remote mud-hut villages
on the banks of the Niger, meeting Dogan sorceresses and tribes who alternately revered and reviled her-
so remarkable was the sight of an unaccompanied white woman paddling all the way to Timbuktu....
MIDNIGHT CROSSING
END OF PART I