In Desert and Wilderness

The renowned Polish novelist, inspired by his travels through Africa, gives us a fascinating book recounting adventures and experiences of two children during an escape from Khartoum after the death of General Gordon, and their flight through Africa to the Indian Ocean. The children=s adventures in the Egyptian desert and African wilderness at the time of the Mahdi (1848 - 1885) also contain a vast quantity of information about the plant and animal life of the African swamps and jungle. Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) was a novelist, born in Poland. He studied at Warsaw, traveled in the USA, and in the 1870s began to write articles, short stories, and novels. His major work was a war trilogy about 17th-century Poland, but his most widely known book is the story of Rome under Nero, Quo Vadis? (1896), several times filmed. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905.