Gustav Mohr came out in his car in the early morning to go in to the railway station with me. It was a cool morning with but little colour in the air or the landscape. He himself looked pale, and blinked, and I remembered what an old Norwegian captain of a whaler down in Durban had explained to me, that the Norwegians are undismayed in any storm, but their nervous system cannot stand a calm. We had tea together on the millstone table, as we had had many times before. Here, to the West, the Hills before us, with a little floating grey mist in the creeks, lived gravely through another moment of their many thousand years. I was very cold as if I had been up there.

My house-boys were still in the empty house, but they had, so to say, already moved their existence to other quarters, their families and their belongings had been sent off. Farah’s women, and Saufe, had gone to the Somali village of Nairobi in a lorry the day before. Farah himself was going with me as far as Mombasa, and so was Juma’s young son Tumbo, because he wanted to do so more than anything else in the world, and when, as parting gift, he had been given the choice between a cow and the journey to Mombasa, he had chosen the journey.

I said good-bye to each of my house-boys, and, as I went out, they, who had been carefully instructed to close the doors, left the door wide open behind me. This was a typical Native gesture, as if they meant that I was to come back again, or else they did so to emphasize that there was now nothing more to close the doors of the house on, and they might as well be open to all the winds. Farah was driving me, slowly, at the pace of a riding-camel I suppose, round by the drive and out of sight of the house.

As we came to the pond, I asked Mohr if we would not have time to stop for a moment, and we got out, and smoked a cigarette by the bank. We saw some fish in the water, which were now to be caught and eaten by people who had not known old Knudsen, and were not aware of the importance of the fish themselves. Here Sirunga, my squatter Kaninu’s small grandson, who was an epileptic, appeared to say a last good-bye to me, for he had been round by the house to do so, incessantly, for the last days. When we got into the cars again and went off, he started to run after the cars as fast as he could, as if whirled on in the dust by the wind, for he was so small,—like the final little spark from my fire. He ran all the way to where the farm-road joined the highroad, and I was afraid that he might come with us on to the highroad as well; it would have been then as if now all the farm were scattered and blown about in husks. But he stopped up at the corner, after all he did still belong to the farm. He stood there and stared after us, as long as I could see the turning of the farm-road.

On the way in to Nairobi, we saw a number of grasshoppers in the grass and on the road itself, a few whirred into the car, it looked as if they were coming back upon the country once more.

Many of my friends had come down to the station to see me off. Hugh Martin was there, heavy and nonchalant, and as he came and said good-bye to me, I saw my Doctor Pangloss of the farm as a very lonely figure, a heroic figure, who had bought his loneliness with everything he had, and somehow an African symbol. We took a friendly leave: we had had much fun together, and many wise talks. Lord Delamere was a little older, a little whiter, and with his hair cut shorter than when I had had tea with him in the Masai Reserve, when I came down there with my ox-transport, at the beginning of the war, but as exceedingly and concernedly courteous and polite now as then. Most of the Somalis of Nairobi were on the platform. The old cattle-trader Abdallah came up and gave me a silver ring with a turquoise in it, to bring me luck. Bilea, Denys’s servant gravely asked me to give his respects to his master’s brother in England, in whose house he had stayed in the old days. The Somali women, Farah told me on the way down in the train, had been at the station in rickshas, but when they had seen so many Somali men collected there, they had lost heart and had just driven back.

Gustav Mohr and I shook hands when I was already in the train. Now that the train was going to move, was already moving, he had got back his balance of mind. He wished so strongly to impart courage to me that he blushed deeply; his face was flaming and his light eyes shining at me.

At the Samburu station on the line, I got out of the train while the engine was taking in water, and walked with Farah on the platform.

From there, to the South-West, I saw the Ngong Hills. The noble wave of the mountain rose above the surrounding flat land, all air-blue. But it was so far away that the four peaks looked trifling, hardly distinguishable, and different from the way they looked from the farm. The outline of the mountain was slowly smoothed and levelled out by the hand of distance.