April 1961
Buried treasure … There has always been treasure, and most of it has at one time or another been buried: it has also always been in the nature of every right spirited person when they hear of such stuff to want to dig it up. Nowadays, however, in spite of many other improvements, there is a distressing lack of pirates, torn old maps, and practically fruitful last words, and so Miss Lane is unusually lucky to have married someone who inherited both a map and first-hand information about a hoard of uncut diamonds buried seventy years ago in the grave of an African chief in the Portuguese African territory of Mozambique. The original possessor of this knowledge had himself made an abortive attempt to discover the chief’s grave forty years ago, and had been defeated by illness and the difficulties of the country, but his failure in no way invalidated his information, over which this author and her husband brooded with a kind of detached luxury and the high gloss of excitement which complete ignorance of the problems involved blissfully lend to a potential adventure of this kind.
Eventually, in 1958, they decided that they would attempt their own expedition, together with their nephew. They none of them knew the country at all and found that the area in which they were interested was virtually unmapped. Forty years could render all the clues on their own tattered map unrecognisable, and they could not only expect no help locally, but positive hostility if their intentions became known. They needed advice and were in no position to ask for it. So they invented a cover story to account for them wishing to go to such an unfashionable part of Africa - and to stall the well-meant advice from those of their friends accustomed to stylish safaris.
They arrived in Salisbury in April 1959, to be met by their nephew and to find that their travel agent, uneasy at the prospect of three greenhorns going off alone into the bush, had decided to send his son, a Rhodesian police officer, along with them, and he was accompanied by a huge Alsatian (also in the Force) appropriately named Shadow. Miss Lane’s account of what followed with the three treasure hunters struggling to provide adequate reasons for their mad and futile requirements against the policeman’s idea of a jolly good leave in the bush is both entertaining and exciting, and graced by English of the most excellent clarity and unobtrusive style: she also gives, or implies, a remarkably good picture of the moods and phases which underlie the life of an expedition as opposed to a piece of ordinary travelling.