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Mazower is professor of history at Columbia and author of Dark Continent, the acclaimed study of the forces that shaped 20th century Europe.

In those days, Africa was the "Dark Continent"; the source of the Nile and the Great Lakes were undiscovered, of the Congo nothing was known.

In Africa—the Dark Continent—the author follows in exciting detail his young heroes, their voyage in the first aeroplane to fly above the mysterious forests and unexplored ranges of the mystic land.

If inferior in breadth to the mighty Amazon, if it lacks the length of the Mississippi, if without the stupendous gorges and cataracts of the Yang-tse-Kiang of China, if missing the ancient castles of the Rhine, if wanting the lonely grandeur that still overhangs the Congo of the Dark Continent, the Great River of Canada has features as remarkable as any of these.

Isolated in the heartland of the Dark Continent, the Afrikaners were relatively untouched by the liberalizing forces that swept Europe and America in the 19th century.