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By Root 3060 0

resist downing another leviathan—his eighth—and guzzling the “excellent soup” made from its trunk. He is in superb health, having (perhaps with the aid of Cuban fever) deflected all local diseases. If the rheumatism he began to complain of in his last years as President still troubles him, he has stopped mentioning it. His stride is tireless, unusually long for a small-boned man five feet nine inches tall. He can run, carrying a heavy gun, for one and a half miles in 102°F heat. He eats enormously, but his constant activity burns up fat. He looks better than at any time in his adult life: tanned, hard-muscled, sun bleach gilding the slight gray in his hair. Even his monocular eyesight seems improved. He is the first in his party to spot a distant herd of buffalo, “their dark forms picked out by highlights on the curve of their horns.” His hearing remains phenomenal, and he is intrigued to find that his sense of smell has become animal-like, alerting him to the nearness of invisible prey.

He has, in short, reached his peak as a hunter, exuberantly altered from the pale, overweight statesman of ten months ago. Africa’s way of reducing every problem of existence to dire alternatives—shoot or starve, kill or be killed, shelter or suffer, procreate or count for nothing—has clarified his thinking, purged him of politics and its constant search for compromise. Yet on the seventh day of the new year, as he enters the valley of the White Nile at Butiaba, he begins to accept that his retreat into the Pleistocene is over. A reverse journey is under way: he feels himself “passing through stratum after stratum of savagery and semicivilization … each stage representing some thousands of years of advance upon the preceding.”

The advance is as slow as he can make it. It proceeds amphibiously, with most of his porters trekking inland from Kobe to Nimule, while the white command meanders downriver in a flotilla of five small boats. He orders a three-week halt just south of the third parallel, and in a hunting orgy with Kermit, kills nine white rhinos.

A MONTH LATER, he reaches Gondokoro in the southern Sudan. By now, after a final chase after giant eland, he feels that he has advanced at least as far as the seventh century. A letter from Henry Cabot Lodge jerks him further forward. It warns that a phalanx of foreign correspondents will waylay him at Khartoum, 750 miles north. “There is a constantly growing thought of you and your return to the Presidency.… They will all try to get you to say things. I think it is of the first importance that you should say absolutely nothing about American politics before you get home.”

He insists in reply that all he wants to do is finish his book, tour Europe with Edith, Kermit, and Ethel, and then come home as a private citizen. “At present it does not seem to me that it would be wise, from any side, for me to be a candidate. But that can wait.”

THREE MEMBERS OF THE KHARTOUM press contingent, however, cannot. On 11 March they emerge from the Nile’s dawn mist in a commandeered steamboat, waving sun helmets and the Stars and Stripes. Encouraged by his return of salute, they introduce themselves as representatives of the Chicago Tribune, New York World, and United Press. He invites them to dinner aboard his new ship, the Dal, a luxury sternwheeler made available by the Governor-General of the Sudan. But when they row over that evening, they find the table laid on its forward barge, full of malodorous hides. The message is clear: he still considers himself a traveling hunter.

They listen frustrated as he tells story after safari story, his face silhouetted against a papyrus fire in the swamp of Ar Rank. Eventually he gives them a statement—of sorts—for publication: “We [sic] have nothing to say and will have nothing to say on American or foreign policy questions.… I will give no interviews and anything purporting to be an interview with me can be accepted as false as soon as it appears.”

Courteously, the next morning, he orders the newsmen back downriver, and spends the next two days writing in