When I sit with my daughter around a campfire or in front of the fireplace at Kuti, and the peculiar silence of the African night is full of the voices of a million crickets … I remember the adventures of the past, the people I have known, and I tell her their story …

Kuki Gallmann, whose haunting bestseller, I Dreamed of Africa, so perfectly captured the beauty and drama of the Kenyan highlands, and who so generously barred her heart to its readers, here evokes, through a tapestry of interwoven true episodes, the magic that touches all African life.

Whether the adventure of a moonlit picnic on a vanishing island, or the pleasure of building a unique bed, her son’s entrancement with chameleons, or the mystical visit of a king cobra to his grave, a brief communion with a Masai woman, the mysterious compassion of an elephant herd, or the wild peace of night lost in the highlands, in each event Kuki Gallmann, a born storyteller, conveys her delight and wonder at the whole fabric of creation.

She recounts touching moments with people passing through, and enduring friendships constantly renewed, strange and wonderful encounters with animals, the vivid beauty of coast and ocean, the magnificence of the mountains and the teeming life of forest and savannah; disasters miraculously averted and deaths imbued with resurrection.

Like I Dreamed of Africa, in which she shared her vision of harmony between man and his environment, so this book reveals the third element of that indivisible trinity: Africa’s soul.