Kinanjui’s grave had been dug under a couple of tall Eucalyptus trees on the plain, and a rope was extended round it. I had come early and therefore stood close to the grave, by the rope, from where I could watch the assemblage grow and settle, like flies, round it.

They brought Kinanjui from the Mission on a lorry, and lifted him down near the grave. I do not think that I have ever in my life been more taken aback and appalled than I was then, at the sight of him. He had been a big man, and I remembered him as I had seen him when he came walking over to the farm amongst his senators, even as he had looked lying on his bed, two nights ago. But the coffin in which they now brought him was a nearly square box, surely no more than five feet long. I did not take it to be a coffin when I first set eyes on it; it must be, I thought, some box of appliances for the funeral. But it was Kinanjui’s coffin. I have never known why it was chosen, perhaps it was a thing that they had had at the Scotch Mission. But how had they got Kinanjui down there and how was he now lying in it? They placed the coffin on the ground, close to where I stood.

The coffin had a large silver plate on it with an inscription, which told, I was afterwards informed, that it had been given by the Mission to the Chief Kinanjui, and with a scriptural text on it.

There was a long funeral service. One after another, the Missionaries stood forth and spoke, and I suppose that they got in much profession and admonition. But I did not hear any of it, I was holding on to the rope round Kinanjui’s grave. Some of the Christian Natives followed them up, and brayed out over the green plain.

In the end Kinanjui was lowered into the ground of his own country, and covered with it.

I had taken my house-boys with me to Dagoretti so that they should see the funeral, and they were staying to talk with their friends and relations there, and coming back on foot, so that Farah and I drove home by ourselves. Farah was as silent as the grave we had left. It had been hard to Farah to swallow the fact that I would not take Kinanjui back to my house with me, for two days he had been like a lost soul, and in the clutch of great doubts and depressions.

Now as we drove up before the door he said: “Never mind, Memsahib.”

Denys Finch-Hatton had come in from one of his Safaris, and he had stayed for a little whi le on the farm, but, when i began to break up my house and to pack, and he could stay there no longer, he went away and lived in Hugh Martin’s house in Nairobi. From there he drove out to the farm every day and dined with me, sitting,—towards the end, when I was selling my furniture,—on one packing-case and dining from another. We sat there late into the night.

A few times, Denys and I spoke as if I was really going to leave the country. He himself looked upon Africa as his home, and he understood me very well and grieved with me then, even if he laughed at my distress at parting with my people.

“Do you feel,” he said, “that you cannot live without Sirunga?”

“Yes,” I said.

But most of the time when we were together, we talked and acted as if the future did not exist; it had never been his way to worry about it, for it was as if he knew that he could draw upon forces unknown to us if he wanted to. He fell in naturally with my scheme of leaving things to themselves, and other people to think and say what they liked. When he was there, it seemed to be a normal thing, and in accordance with our own taste, that we should sit upon packing-cases within an empty house. He quoted a poem to me:

During those weeks, we used to go up for short flights out over the Ngong Hills or down over the Game Reserve. One morning, Denys came out to the farm to fetch me quite early, just as the sun was up, and then we saw a lion on the plain South of the Hills.

He talked of packing up his books, that had been in my house for many years, but he never got any further with the job.

“You keep them,” he said, “now I have no place to put them.”

He could not make up his mind at all where to go when my house should be closed. Once, upon the persistent advice of a friend, he went so far as to drive in to Nairobi, and to take a look at the bungalows to be let there, but he came back so repelled with what he had seen that he did not even like to talk about it, and at dinner, when he began to give me a description of the houses and the furniture, he stopped himself and sat silent over it, with a dislike and sadness in his face that was unusual to him. He had been in contact with a kind of existence the idea of which was unbearable to him.

It was, however, a completely objective and impersonal disapprobation, he had forgotten that he himself had meant to be a party to this existence, and when I spoke of it, he interrupted me. “Oh, as to me,” he said, “I shall be perfectly happy in a tent in the Masai Reserve, or I shall take a house in the Somali village.”

But on this occasion he, for once, spoke of my future in Europe. I might be happier there than on the farm, he thought, and well out of the sort of civilization that we were going to get in Africa. “You know,” he went on, “this Continent of Africa has a terrible strong sense of sarcasm.”

Denys owned a piece of land down at the coast, thirty miles North of Mombasa on the Creek of Takaunga. Here were the ruins of an old Arab settlement, with a very modest minaret and a well,—a weathered growth of grey stone on the salted soil, and in the midst of it a few old Mango trees. He had built a small house on his land and I had stayed there. The scenery was of a divine, clean, barren Marine greatness, with the blue Indian Ocean before you, the deep creek of Takaunga to the South, and the long steep unbroken coast-line of pale grey and yellow coral-rock as far as the eye reached.

When the tide was out, you could walk miles away Seawards from the house, as on a tremendous, somewhat unevenly paved Piazza, picking up strange long peaked shells and starfish. The Swaheli fishermen came wandering along here, in a loin-cloth and red or blue turbans, like Sindbad the Sailor come to life, to offer for sale multi-coloured spiked fish, some of which were very good to eat. The coast below the house had a row of scooped-out deep caves and grottoes, where you sat in shade and watched the distant glittering blue water. When the tide came in, it filled up the caves to the level of the ground on which the house was built, and in the porous coral-rock the Sea sang and sighed in the strangest way, as if the ground below your feet were alive; the long waves came running up Takaunga Creek like a storming army.

It was full moon while I was down at Takaunga, and the beauty of the radiant, still nights was so perfect that the heart bent under it. You slept with the doors open to the silver Sea; the playing warm breeze in a low whisper swept in a little loose sand, on to the stone floor. One night a row of Arab dhows came along, close to the coast, running noiselessly before the monsoon, a file of brown shadow-sails under the moon.

Denys sometimes talked of making Takaunga his home in Africa, and of starting his Safaris from there. When I began to talk of having to leave the farm, he offered me his house down there, as he had had mine in the highlands. But white people cannot live for a long time at the coast unless they are able to have many comforts, and Takaunga was too low and too hot for me.

In the month of May of the year when I left Africa, Denys went down to Takaunga for a week. He was planning to build a larger house and to plant Mango trees on his land. He went away in his aeroplane and was intending to make his way home round by Voi, to see if there were any Elephants there for his Safaris. The Natives had been talking much of a herd of Elephants which had come on to the land round Voi from the West, and in particular of one big bull, twice the size of any other Elephant, that was wandering in the bush there, all by himself.