The author of the Hornblower novels returns in this new book to Africa, the setting of an earlier and memorable story, The African Queen.
This is the dramatic story of a man who was also a god. It tells how that man exchanged heavenly omnipotence for earthly power, and how the exchange was accompanied by the first faint intimations of human love a story as old as Adam, and as new as sky travel.
In the beginning Loa was all-powerful in his tiny native village, brother of the forest, his friendly brother, and of the sky, the unfriendly one. Into this idyllic scene came the Arab raiders, burning, killing and enslaving the village under the hated whip and yoke. Terror and hardship forced Loa to realize he was only a man after all, but the change was made bearable by his wife, Musini, who continued to worship him as a god in public and perhaps let him think she did in private, while actually discovering a new tenderness for him as a man. Furthermore, Loa was not too slow to learn that where a god may rule a village, empires are man-made,
In this unusual tale the author has given the reader an uncanny feeling for the vastness, the strange moods and customs, of an earlier time in a mysterious land. In Loa he has created another man's man who, like Hornblower, is full of courage and also of conceits and misgivings and the other human foibles which mark a Forester hero, whether he be a commodore in His Majesty's Navy or a chieftain in the depths of Africa.
This book has not been published as a serial prior to book publication.
—from the dust jacket
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