She Walked Into the Forest Nobody Leaves Alive — Then Complained That London Was Too Tiring

She arrives in London wearing a bangle woven from giraffe's hair — a gift, she says, from the chief of the Wambis tribe, and a magic one at that.

Her name is Dorothy Dinham. She is twenty-two, auburn-haired, and by every account looks about eighteen. She is also, quietly, a well-known short-story writer publishing under the pseudonym Manners Sulton.

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And she has just come out of Central Africa with photographs, material, and a story that reads like something her own pen name would have invented.

It starts in Melbourne. Dinham sets out with a girl companion and a plan to gather literary material at the source. At Capetown the companion turns for home. Dinham does not.

From there it is Johannesburg, then the Kalahari desert, then Rhodesia, then Victoria Falls — where she meets an American woman scientist who has been compelled to leave an insane husband and who, by the time they speak, is becoming mentally affected herself.

The scientist tells her eerie stories about the Victoria forest on the borders of the Congo. Legend, she says, holds that nobody crosses it alive.

Dinham decides to push on to Cairo.

She engages porters and reaches Elizabethville, the last outpost of civilisation, where she is stranded — the Lualaba River is blocked by papyrus. A continent-crossing expedition halted by grass.

Via Kongola she reaches Ponthierville, an old Arab town near Stanleyville, and canoes up the Itimbiri River among hippopotami and crocodiles. At Buta she is turned back by an epidemic among the local population.

That is where the adventure turns.

Her sixteen Arabezi porters hear the word epidemic, put the baggage down, and leave. Dinham is left with two Basuto boys who do not know the country.

The three of them walk into the Victoria forest and wander there for a fortnight.

Her description of two weeks lost in a forest that legend says has no survivors is one sentence long: 'But even there time is nothing.'

They emerge at Lisala, where the Belgians receive her hospitably. She boards a wood-burning steamer crowded with people and crammed with goats and chickens — which double as the passengers' meals — and rides it to Kinshasa, where the captain hands her over to the police for safekeeping.

Her Swahili is no use. The locals speak Bangala.

She collapses on landing. The British Consul rescues her and sends her onward with a white escort to Matadi on the coast, where she learns that cannibals had eaten a white man shortly before her arrival. From Matadi it's a steamer to Belgium, then on to England.

And in London, a Daily News interviewer asks the obvious question.

'I don't like London,' she says. 'It is too tiring, and I would return to the Congo immediately if I could.'

One more detail the papers cannot get over: she wore a white travelling suit the entire way, and at trading stations she occasionally changed into her daintiest evening frock.

Next, she says, she wants to cross Siberia and South America. She already has French. She is learning Russian and Spanish.

The reaction to her story splits fast.

One commenter's first instinct was not the crocodiles but the byline: how does anyone actually find the writings of Manners Sulton? A woman travels across Africa expressly to gather literary material, publishes under a man's name, and the work itself disappears while the pseudonym survives.

Another was drawn to the strangest scene in the account — the friendship at Victoria Falls with the eccentric American scientist who had been compelled to leave an insane husband and was slipping herself. Two women at the edge of an empire, one unravelling, one about to walk into a forest anyway, and the newspaper devotes a paragraph to her frock.

But there is a sharper reading. This is a press account, not a logbook — and it is a press account given by a professional fiction writer who knows exactly how a homecoming should be shaped. The magic bangle. The girl of 22 who looks 18. The cannibals conveniently one week ahead of her. The evening frock at the trading post.

And there is the word 'alone,' which does a lot of work here. Dinham was never alone. Sixteen porters carried her baggage. Two Basuto boys walked her out of the forest. Belgians housed her, a Consul rescued her, an escort delivered her to the coast.

The sixteen men who put the baggage down are filed in the story as deserters. Read another way, they were the only people in the entire account who heard the word 'epidemic' and made the sensible decision.

Which leaves the question the story never answers: is Dorothy Dinham a lost great of travel writing we owe a search — or a gifted self-mythologiser whose truest story belongs to the men who walked away?

The hosts of History Uncut take both sides of that argument on the show — and then head east, to a war Moscow swore was already over.