Sand Rivers

“In late 1979, the writer and naturalist Peter Matthiessen and the wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick joined a safari into the Selous Game Reserve in southern Tanzania, one of the largest yet least-known strongholds of wild animals left on earth. Sand Rivers is their beautiful account of a remarkable trip into the quintessential East African wilderness.

Here, along the glinting sand rivers, among the hills littered with stone tools, in the endless miombo woodlands, are the lion and antelope, the hippos, elephants, crocodiles, rhinos, and dazzling birds that are the glory of the African landscape. But in the coppery autumnal light there is also a great silence, and in the silence resound harsh questions that we must ask about the future of all the earth’s wildernesses.

A foot safari into its roadless inner spaces is the climax of Mr. Matthiessen’s extraordinary portrait of the Selous and of the fierce, lonely men who shaped its history and are shaping its future. His text evokes with characteristic brilliance not only the natural beauties but also the human and social realities of the Selous; it is spectacularly matches by Hugo van Lawick’s photographs in full colour.’