Promises to Keep E-Book

Hugh Cran

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 634

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Working at the sharp end, Scottish vet Hugh Cran describes his daily and nightly challenges working in Kenya as he encounters rabid dogs, a horse pageant that goes horribly wrong, missing tortoises, entire herds of sick cattle and corrupt policemen: he even witnesses how a witchdoctor successfully identifies a thief. Busy from early morning to midnight, Hugh never turns down a call to help an animal in distress, even if this means driving across floods or deserts, surviving vehicle break-downs or insanitary operating conditions on arrival. In this book, Hugh falls in love, marries and starts a family, climbs Kenyan mountains, survives a life-threatening health crisis, a surgery fire and a serious legal accusation. Throughout it all, he remains a dedicated and hardworking local vet, serving his African community, no matter what. He has promises to keep...

Leseprobe

PROMISES TO KEEP

PROMISES TO KEEP

A British Vet in Africa

Hugh Cran

MERLIN UNWIN BOOKS

But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep

STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENINGRobert Frost

To our peerless daughters Kim, Sophie and Rona

CONTENTS

1.    Night Games

2.    A Trip to the Lake

3.    Nipped in the Bud

4.    Dick the Dog

5.    Showtime

6.    French Dressing

7.    A Walk in the Park

8.    Italian Dessert

9.    Steering Wheel Blues

10.  Lump in the Throat

11.  Things that go Bump in the Night

12.  T9

13.  A Dash of Smirnoff

14.  A Touch of the Irish and a Night on the Bare Mountain

15.  Wedding Bells

16.  The Eyes have it

17.  Pestle and Mortar

18.  Chally

19.  The Queen of the Jungle

20.  In the Lions’ Den

21.  ‘Troubled the Deep Waters’

22.  Rabies

23.  Fire and Brimstone

24.  Baconhand and Friends

25.  Gussie

26.  Lumps and Bumps

27.  Time for a Tortoise

28.  Off the Menu

29.  The Stare of the Scorpion

Chapter One

NIGHT GAMES

‘Time to hit the sack,’ I said to my Berna, my lovely and long-suffering bed-mate, ‘I’ve got 140 cattle to pregnancy test at Beaumont-Bott’s place on the other side of Eldoret at eight tomorrow morning. I’m going to have to get up at 5.30 in order get away by six.’

Eldoret was 100 miles away on the road to Uganda.

As I shuffled off to the bathroom, the phone rang. Berna lifted the receiver. ‘It’s the police,’ she said. My heart skipped a beat. The Dixon of Dock Green type did not figure in the ranks of the Kenyan constabulary. Most of the ones I had met were narrow eyed, overweight and open palmed. Had they finally run me to earth for that time I had failed to stop at a road block on the way to Naivasha? Had the cop’s hand been raised to stop me or was he just scratching his head? Naturally I had assumed the latter. ‘It’s the Dog Section,’ said Berna. Major relief.

‘Inspector Macharia here,’ an authoritarian voice declared. ‘One of our German Shepherds is sick.’ Less relief. ‘She ate all right at six, but now her stomach is swollen and she is trying to vomit and having difficulty in breathing. She doesn’t look good. She’s twelve years old but she’s one of our best dogs.’ They always are, I thought. I looked at my watch – 10pm.

‘Right,’ I replied. ‘You’d better bring her to the surgery right away. This sounds serious.’

Berna came along to help me and we got to the surgery in short order. We arrived before the police. I opened the door, put on the lights and started getting things ready. ‘This is probably torsion of the stomach,’ I said to Berna. ‘Happens in big dogs after a meal and a bit of exercise. Fatal unless treated very early.’

‘So what do you have to do?’

‘Probably open her up – ah, here they are.’

The police van screeched to a halt, headlights shining through the open door of the surgery. A posse of gendarmes marched in, leading a large German Shepherd bitch. She staggered slightly, stopped, salivated, lowered her head and made an ineffectual attempt to vomit. I palpated her abdomen. It was grossly distended, as tense as a drum and so hard that I feared to exert pressure lest I precipitate a terminal collapse.

I addressed the uniformed front rank. ‘From what I can feel she’s got a twisted stomach, which is now distended with gas. We’ve got to act fast, or she’ll die very soon, so I want two men to stay to help. The rest can go.’ A spokesman barked a command and Berna and I were left with the bloated patient and two cops.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘first of all we have to give her fluids – i/v.’

‘How much?’ asked Berna.

‘Well, she’s about 35 kilos, so up to three litres. But we’ll give her a litre and see how we go.’ The policemen lifted the bitch onto the surgery table. I clipped the hair from her right foreleg below the elbow, and fed a catheter into her cephalic vein, attached it to a bottle of Hartmann’s solution, held by Berna, and ran in the fluid. After fifteen minutes the litre was finished and the bitch looked no better. If anything she was worse, gasping and groaning.

‘Let’s give her another half litre and then try to get rid of some of the gas,’ I said. I ran in the fluid.

‘Right, lift her off the table and stand her on the floor. Let’s see if we can pass a stomach tube.’

‘A stomach tube for dogs?’ asked Berna. ‘I didn’t know you had one.’

‘I haven’t, but I do have several sizes for horses. We’ll try the yearling model.’

I placed a bandage roll in the bitch’s mouth and asked one of the policemen to hold the mouth shut while I fed the tube through the middle of the roll. But try as I might it was impossible to pass the tube. I gave her an injection of Valium and tried again. No go. ‘Right, we’ll have to decompress the stomach with a large bore needle and then try again.’ I rummaged in my surgical bag and located a 14 gauge cattle needle. I sterilised this, clipped an area over the bitch’s right side, just behind the ribs, where the distension and tympany was at its maximum, sterilised that and pushed the needle through the skin and into the stomach. There was a rush of gas and a satisfactory deflation, before the needle became blocked with stomach contents.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Shall we try the stomach tube again?’ This time the tube slid down and more gas was released.

‘Right, a little more i/v fluid, and we’re ready to open her up. Are we all ready?’ Berna was. The two gendarmes looked less sure. Another litre together with i/v antibiotics, then the pre-med. The instruments were ready, the anaesthetic, ketamine, was not ideal, but I was strapped for choice. This was Africa, not Bognor or Brighton. The patient was now unconscious. We lifted her onto the table and I shaved her abdomen and clipped drapes over the incisional area.

‘OK, here we go.’ Very carefully I made an incision through the midline from sternum to umbilicus – carefully – as the last thing I wanted to do was to puncture a distended stomach and contaminate the abdominal cavity. As I cut, the distended stomach came into view, protruding through my incision, still distended, despite gas being removed by needle and stomach tube, as it was still rotated and still producing gas. The now visualised stomach was covered with the greater omentum, the lacy part of the mesentery which covers and protects this part of the abdominal cavity. Seeing this I knew that the stomach was rotated in a clockwise direction, as viewed from the dog’s rear.

Something made me look up. One of the policemen had gone a strange grey-green colour. He was swallowing convulsively, which I knew was the horrid precursor to a burst of vomiting, the very last thing I wanted mid-operation. ‘Out! Out!’ I bellowed. He fled.

‘And then there were three,’ I said. ‘On we go. Now I have to try and turn the stomach back to its correct position. But first I’d better deflate her a bit more. Berna, is she still breathing at your end?’

‘Yes, looks fine to me.’

‘Good, can you give me that cattle needle again. Thanks.’ There was a welcome high-pitched hiss as I pushed the needle into the stomach and the mounded balloon sank until it was no longer under internal pressure. ‘Great, here we go.’ By pushing down on the right side of the stomach and pulling on the left, the organ slowly swivelled anti-clockwise, followed by its attendant spleen. ‘Looks good,’ I said, ‘no sign of damage. The last thing I want to do is to resect a chunk of necrotic stomach wall. Then the outcome can be poor to hopeless. But I can feel big pieces of meat in here so we’ll have to open the stomach, empty it, stitch it up and then stitch the stomach to the abdominal wall to prevent a recurrence of the problem.’

‘Oh yes, and how do you do that?’ asked Berna.

‘You make a careful incision in the wall of the stomach, without going the whole way through, and then make another in the muscle of the nearest abdominal wall and stitch them together. They form a strong adhesion which prevents the stomach from twisting again. Simple!’ Simple indeed, but it took me another hour to empty the stomach, close it up, perform the so-called incisional gastropexy and then close the abdomen. During this time I had to top up the anaesthesia. The bitch was coming round, I was pleased to see. When they don’t come round, is when you worry.

My back was giving me stick. I had been bent over for what seemed like hours. ‘Berna,’ I asked. ‘What’s the time?’

‘One o’clock.’

‘Ye gods! And I’ve got to be on the road by six.’ The sole remaining member of the forces of Law and Order was out on his feet, leaning against the wall, eyes half closed.

‘Right, let’s cut her down, give her some more antibiotic, and some more fluids and that’s it. We’ll put her in one of the kennels and keep her here for a few days to keep an eye on her. Nothing by mouth for the first day, then water offered on the second day and a little food, and then small meals three times daily and limited exercise.’

The bitch survived, one of the lucky ones. Many are found dead, having died within an hour or so. Others develop post-operative complications.

By the time I got to bed at 2am I felt that I was in imminent danger of developing post-operative complications myself.

But after a restorative three and a half hour’s slumber I was up and by six on the road to Eldoret.

Old B-B, as Beaumont-Bott was generally called, was an ex-submariner, with a neatly trimmed naval beard. As such he had everything shipshape and Bristol fashion when I arrived on the farm. The cows were lined up in the crush, heads to the right, backsides to the left, just as I liked them to be. Hot water was in abundance, together with soap and an array of towels. Soft fluffy ones to care for the hands, hard hairy ones for forearms and upper arms. And the other hands, namely the rustic farmhands, were drilled to perfection. B-B, wearing a nautical peaked cap, sat on a sort of wooden poop deck, directing operations and writing down my findings as I shouted them out. By 11.30 we were finished. By 12.30 I was cleaned up, had a spot of much-needed tiffin and a small glass of port and was on my way back to Nakuru. I rolled into the surgery at 2.30 to find it packed. Dogs were barking, cats were miaowing, there was even a goat bleating in the corner. By the time I had dealt with them all it was after five and I still had three farms to visit, including a cow with a prolapse.

I was home by eight, in the dark. The light dims rapidly on the equator and by seven the light has gone. The house girl had left for her well-deserved repose but Berna had the hot dinner waiting as I staggered in. ‘Gad, what a day!’ I gasped. ‘An early night tonight I think. Can’t wait to get the old head on the pillow. But the good news is that the bitch we operated on during the night is doing fine.’

‘Wonderful!’ said Berna.

I tucked into the hot meat pie and pastry, the house girl’s speciality, followed by my favourite – rhubarb crumble. ‘Ah, that’s better. Thanks so much for that! Now I think I’ll take a cold beer from the fridge and have a good soak in the tub. Try to unwind.’

‘You do that. You deserve it.’

I lay back in the tub, sipping my beer and letting the hot water do its soothing work. I closed my eyes. I was still at Eldoret, B-B was bellowing at his workers and my arm was up a cow’s rectum. Then I was behind the wheel of my Peugeot, dodging potholes. I swigged my beer, placed the bottle carefully on the floor and promptly fell asleep. But I wasn’t asleep because what was that ringing noise? Then knocking. ‘Hugh! Hugh! Mike Higgins is on the phone! He says that his Alsatian has been gored by a hippo and that its guts are hanging out! Can you speak to him?’

Groaning and gasping I hauled myself out of the bath, water flooding all over the floor. Wrapping a towel around my midriff I tottered to the phone. Mike lived on the shores of Lake Naivasha, 80 kilometres from Nakuru. ‘Hi Mike, what’s happened?’

‘Hello, Hugh, I put my Alsatian bitch Sukari out into the garden so that she could have a pee and there was this ruddy great hippo on the lawn. Lifted her into the air with its enormous canines and when she came down her innards were hanging out. The hippo took off when I shone a torch into its eyes.’

‘Right, you’d better get her here fast, but first soak a clean sheet in warm water and wrap it around the intestines and try to keep Sukari from standing up. Make sure you have someone holding the sheet in place until you get here.’

‘Right, I’ll be at the surgery in about an hour. I’ll bring the askari to help.’

I put the phone down. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Nine pm. Mike should be arriving at about ten. Same as last night. Setting a pattern. I returned to the bathroom, collected my discarded raiment and put them back on. So much for the early night!

Once again Berna and I made a nocturnal trip to the surgery and prepared a tray of instruments in readiness for the arrival of bitch number two. At five minutes to ten Mike’s Land Cruiser roared round the corner and screeched to a halt. Once again blinding headlights shone through the open door of the surgery.

Berna and I went out to help.

Sukari was lying on the back seat, swathed almost entirely in an enormous white sheet. Only her nose was visible. Sitting beside her was the askari (security guard), a ferocious looking individual, clad in a greatcoat which looked as though it had seen service during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. Mike hopped out of the driver’s seat and all four of us, very carefully, carried Sukari inside the surgery. As we did so an oversized raindrop fell on my forehead, followed a second later by a clap of thunder. Heavy rain began to fall.

Once inside, the first job was to weigh the patient on the scales, before undoing her shroud. This done we carried Sukari through to the operating room and laid her on the table. I undid a corner of the sheet and peeped inside. A coil of blue intestines met my gaze. I quickly closed up and gave her a pre-med injection. As I was scrubbing up I asked Mike why he had called his bitch Sukari – Swahili for sugar. He laughed. ‘I just love ‘Some Like It Hot’, that wonderful black and white comedy with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. In the film her name was Sugar.’ Sugar was now well sedated. I gave her a half dose of anaesthetic. Didn’t want to shove her over the edge. I could top her up later as required.

We lifted her onto the operating table, laid her on her back, secured her legs and removed the sheet.

‘Ye gods!’ I exclaimed. A ragged open wound extended from her umbilicus to her pelvis. A mass of looped intestines hung to one side of poor Sugar. Bits of grass and dirt were stuck to the exposed vitals. Gently I lifted the intestines and laid them on a clean surgical drape. ‘Berna,’ I said, ‘can you bring a litre of warm Hartmann’s solution so that we can clean up this mess.’ I picked off the debris and washed the exposed intestines until I was certain that no foreign bodies were left. Now we had to clean and shave Sugar’s abdomen, without contaminating the eventrated viscera – a delicate and tedious task. I examined the intestines with care, looking at their colour, checking the pulsation of their blood vessels, searching for any punctures and leakages. All looked well. But we had to move fast. The exposure of intestines is a deeply shocking event, and can quickly lead to irreversible decline.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘let’s get this lot inside where they belong.’ As I spoke there was a deafening clap of thunder, followed almost simultaneously by a blinding flash of lightning, and all the lights went out, plunging us into total darkness. But Berna was up to the crisis. Ever since we had had a night-time puncture on the Rift Valley escarpment when coming back from a right royal reception in Nairobi, she had always carried, on her person, day and night, a small powerful torch. Assisting in the replacement of a wheel in a howling gale, when you are eight months pregnant, with only a candle stub for fitful illumination is not something you wish to repeat in a hurry. Some people carry Swiss army knives, others ivory handled pistols, Berna had her Mini Maglite. She whipped it from its secret hiding place and we continued with the replacement. More warm Hartmann’s solution to irrigate the abdominal cavity, then the painstaking business of stitching the muscles, the subcutaneous tissues and finally the skin. Intravenous fluids, antibiotic and we were done. As I gave the final injection the lights came back on. Sugar was waking up, and we looked at each other in relief. Mike laughed. The askari grinned.

‘OK, Mike, you can either leave her here overnight, we’ll check her in the morning and let you know how she is, or take her home. We’ve no night nurse. It’s up to you.’

Mike opted to leave her. Sukari/Sugar recovered from her encounter with the hippo, finally dying many years later of old age.

I was a British vet in Africa, in Kenya’s Rift Valley Province, based in the town of Nakuru, former capital of the White Highlands. After graduating from Edinburgh in 1963 I had worked for three and a half years in a large-animal practice in Aberdeenshire, in the north-east of Scotland. Tiring of the incessant rain and snow, the grey skies, cold winds and winters which seemed to extend into summer before starting all over again, my thoughts turned to sunnier climes. Nurtured on a literary diet of H. Rider Haggard and Sanders of the River, my overheated imagination saw me in Africa, a noble young pioneer, battling against exotic diseases in an exotic land, aided in my chosen task by a small band of faithful native followers, all clad in the colourful accoutrements of their particular tribe. Aged 26 I set forth for East Africa in December 1966 to take up a job as assistant vet to a hard-boiled Welshman. After about 14 months, a patient in the form of a hump-backed Zebu cow took objection to my ministrations and broke my right leg in several places, landing me in hospital for several months. Upon my discharge my employer announced that he was exhausted, having done the work of two men for the past six months, and that he was off to Mombasa and the coast for a spot of much-needed rest and relaxation. And that was the last I ever saw of him. He had done a moonlight flit and, in a small plane, had taken wing not to the coast but to Rhodesia, as it was then, the craft laden with saleable booty in the form of Persian carpets, game trophies and sundry exotica, but, most importantly, minus receipts of payment from the Income Tax Department to which he owed considerable sums.

He also owed me considerable sums, having paid neither my statutory health insurance nor any wages during my sojourn in hospital. Almost categorised as a Distressed British Subject and down to my last centime I wondered what to do. Help came in the shape of a group of local farmers who formed a company to keep me afloat, until able to stand on my own feet.

I ran the practice single-handed, as described in my book And Miles To Go Before I Sleep, working day and night and taking little time off, until in late 1978, I decided that I was also due a little rest and relaxation…

Chapter Two

A TRIP TO THE LAKE

Something flashed by my window.

Well-chilled beer in hand, I was a passenger in a Toyota Land Cruiser, and rather more than halfway to Ferguson’s Gulf, on the western shores of Lake Rudolf, in Kenya’s northern deserts, heading for the Fishing Lodge.

Getting away had been difficult, as usual.

It was October 1978 and things in my veterinary practice in Nakuru, in Kenya’s Rift Valley Province, were brisk.

The plan was to spend the night in the town of Kitale, at the foot of Mt. Elgon, on the road to the lake. Kitale was four hours from Nakuru. In Africa a journey is measured in hours, not in miles or kilometres. The state of the road is all, whether it is dirt, rock, mud or bitumen. Kitale was 130 miles from Nakuru and the road was good. We had to leave not later than 3pm in order to get there before dark. Not easy, when the phone was ringing and clients were queuing in droves, all expecting the instant, personal touch, from the daktari.

The morning had been enlivened by a request to deal with a donkey which had fallen into a pit latrine, a cow having difficulty giving birth, a horse with biliary fever and a mysterious note from one Miss Hiroko Watanabe asking me to treat her dog for ‘fukuhuom’. After much cerebral dredging I realised that she was referring to ‘hookworm’!

My companions were the ‘Rongai Rake’, curly-headed Dick Davenport, his new wife Aileen, and stepdaughter Agnes. Dick’s reputation as a lady’s man had been somewhat diminished since his recent nuptials, but his enthusiasm for fishing and beer remained undimmed. Aileen was from Aberdeen, with an accent abrasive enough to rasp through pressed steel whenever she opened her mouth, which was pretty much all the time.

We were to meet at Dick’s farm and to join up with other enthusiasts at the lake. The farm was 25 miles from Nakuru, so I had to leave at 2.30pm. I dealt with the last patient, an Asian-owned hound with flea bite dermatitis. The dog had been brought in by an African orderly. Asian owners rarely demeaned themselves with this undignified task. I made for my car, parked ready for a quick getaway in Club Lane, outside the surgery. As I did so, the round, cherubic features of Emilo Ferrini appeared over the swing door. Emilio had an apology of a moustache befouling his upper lip. It looked as though he had spent time with a large chocolate ice cream and had then wiped his mouth with the back of his meaty hand, leaving an unpleasant smear.

Despite his rotund appearance Emilio must have had something which attracted him to members of the opposite sex. If he had been a dog I would have put it down to pheromones. Clustered closely around him was usually a trio or more of dusky maidens.

I often wondered how he earned his daily fix of pasta and martini.

Emilio was one of Life’s time-wasters. He certainly spent a lot of time wasting mine.

‘Hello, Emilio,’ I said. ‘How can I help you?’

‘Buon giorno, daktari,’ Emilio replied. ‘Can you have a look at my dog, Benito? He’s got something wrong with one of his eyes. It looks a bit poppy. I’ve just come back from safari and it doesn’t look too good.’

‘Right, whip him in. I’m just trying to go on safari myself.’

This mild irony was lost on Emilio, who, after giving his fatuous soup strainer a fond caress, rolled through the swing door, dragging a small Heinz 57 behind him.

I looked at the patient and my heart sank.

The left eye was protruding from its socket by a good inch. The corneal surface was dry and abraded, dead and lifeless.

‘Emilio, what the hell has happened here?’ I expostulated as I bent to examine the desiccated orb.

‘Dunno,’ he replied. ‘Maybe a fight wi’ anoder dog. Perhap de askari hit him wi’ da rungu. I’ve been gone for a week. Fishing at Malindi.’

He gave a smirk.

I wondered what species of fish he’d been after.

‘Well, whatever, there’s only one option here and that’s enucleation.’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘Remove the eye, cut it out, it’s past its prime, lost its value.’

‘OK then. When?’

‘Now, this very moment. I should be on my way to Rongai, so let’s get on with it! Moses! Get me a tray of instruments, please, chop chop!’

Moses was my trusty Kikuyu assistant, who had worked with me since my arrival in the country 12 years before, over hill and down dale, through thick and thin. Mostly thick, it seemed to me.

Time was of the essence if I was to make it to Rongai and catch my lift with Dick to the land of the Turkana and their great Lake.

‘Hey doc, you mind if I stay and watch,’ asked Emilio.

‘No probs, old son,’ I replied.

Instruments sterilised, laid out and ready to hand, patient weighed, I prepared the intravenous anaesthetic – sodium pentobarbitone. I clipped the hair over the right foreleg in front of the elbow. Moses pressed his thumb into the angle of the elbow and the cephalic vein appeared. I swabbed the skin with spirit and slipped the needle through the skin and into the vein and trickled in the sleeping draught until Benito slumped forwards, breathing softly and slowly.

A little more and I was ready to begin.

I clipped the eyelids together with tissue forceps and gave them to Moses to hold while I made an incision, encircling the lids, peeling them back until I was able to dissect the globe from the surrounding tissues and lift it from the bony orbit. Carefully I clamped off all bleeding blood vessels and stitched the cut lids together.

‘There we are Emi…Hey Moses, where’s Emilio?’

‘He rushed out soon after you started cutting. He looked a bit green.’ Moses grinned.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s put Benito into a kennel and I’ll get cleaned up. I’ve got to get going. When Mr Emilio returns ask him to collect his dog at about 5pm, when he should be coming round and tell him I’ll be back in 6 days’ time, when he can bring him back for a check-up. I’ve spoken to the District Veterinary Officer and if there are any emergencies while I’m away he has promised to deal with them.’

For the second time I strode purposefully towards my car, a Peugeot 504 saloon, and this time got in and drove away. In those days the mobile phone had yet to be invented, so once away no one could contact me. Free at last!

I roared down the tarmac road towards Kampi ya Simba and Dick’s Kula Mawe Farm. Fortunately for me, radar speed detectors were also some way into the future and I flashed by a couple of somnolent gendarmes before they realised I was there. In my mirror I could see them gaping at my fast-disappearing rear.

I reached the farm at 4.30pm.

Dick was at ease on his verandah, sipping a pre-safari beer.

‘Hi there Hugh! Good to see you! Have a snort!’

‘He will not! You both get your backsides off those chairs.’

Aileen had appeared and was not in a good mood.

‘So, Hugh, you’ve arrived at last I see. A bit late aren’t we? Now we’re going to be driving in the dark and getting to Kitale too late for a decent meal for poor wee Agnes.’

‘Sorry Aileen, affairs of state, you know how it is.’ I gave a light laugh.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Right, then,’ interjected Dick, ‘let’s get on the road.’

Present day Land Cruisers are a far cry from those of 30 years ago. Moving passion wagons, dripping with every modern convenience, from wall to wall carpeting, electrically operated windows, air conditioning, to surround-sound and in-built television sets to ensure the cosseted passengers suffer no untoward discomfort. Dick’s machine was spartan in the extreme. Bolt upright seats covered in an unpleasant, slippery plastic material, which was either icy cold or red hot, depending on the ambient temperature, metal flooring, windows which remained either jammed open or shut, and an all-pervasive stench of hot oil and diesel effectively prevented the occupants, no matter how exhausted they might feel, from nodding off. I sat up front beside Dick. Aileen and Agnes were in the back, which had been padded and upholstered with blankets and cushions to lessen their discomfort.

We clattered down the farm track and along the dirt road to the collection of shacks and hovels at Rongai. A few early inebriates squatting outside the ubiquitous drinking dens squinted at us as we trundled past. A crippled man scuttled on all fours across the road. A child waved. Women carrying water drawn from the nearby soupy river toiled along in the dust, eyes down, bent almost double. Goats rummaged busily in garbage, watched by a solitary, morose marabou stork, whose pendulous wattles sagged nastily beneath a hideous, red, naked neck. An avian undertaker with a cold, dead eye.

We reached the main tarmac road and turned right and up the hill, the western wall of the Rift Valley, towards Eldoret, and Kitale. Past The Jolly Farmer hotel and past the turning to Mau Summit and still upwards and upwards through cedar forest and stands of feathery bamboo, until we reached Timboroa. The nearby railway station was, at over 9000 feet, the highest in the British Empire. And the highest in Africa. I regarded it with the required reverence due to a hoary colonial relic, one of many, inanimate and animate, still extant in former British East.

Beyond Timboroa the road skirted a gloomy mere, fringed with reeds and rushes, climbed another hill covered with yet more bamboo and then descended towards the Uasin Gishu plateau. From here the Afrikaner settlers, who had struggled, with their ox wagons, up that formidable incline from Rongai in 1908, looked down upon the Promised Land, empty of people and dense with countless herds of game – zebra, kongoni, gazelle, giraffe and their attendant carnivores. The plain stretched ahead of us, now empty of game and full of homesteads and tin-roofed dwellings. Their owners were the successors to those dour bible-thumping pioneers who broke the land with ox-drawn ploughs and sowed the first crops the land had ever known. To the bearded Boers sitting on their little ponies it resembled the Transvaal as it had once been and was no more. But the wheel had turned and the Uasin Gishu plateau as it had once been was also no more and the Afrikaners had gone back whence they came, leaving the country when independence arrived. One chapter closed and another opened.

We rattled down the hill. The sun was declining to our left.

I peered through the window at the tangled crests of the Northern Tinderet Forest, wondering whether the mysterious Nandi Bear still lurked in those dark jungles. Known to the locals as the chemosit, it was much talked about, but seldom, if ever, sighted. A land-based equatorial Loch Ness Monster, albeit on a smaller scale. Was it really a bear, a giant hyena, a monster baboon, a tropical Yeti? When King Edward VII was crowned in 1901, five men of the King’s African Rifles were present, one of whom was a Nandi. On being taken to the London zoo they were shown a chimpanzee. The Nandi whooped with delight, exclaiming ‘There is the Nandi Bear!’ Hundreds of years ago the forests of central Africa, including those of Uganda, probably connected with those of western Kenya. The nearby Kakamega Forest, a surviving remnant of the rain forest which once stretched in a continuous belt across equatorial Africa, is still home to many central African species of wildlife. So the most likely theory is that centuries ago chimps roamed the Nandi forests and this has become part of Nandi history and legend, oral and unwritten, but bearing nonetheless the smack of truth.

As the light dimmed I scanned the trees for signs of anthropoid activity, but saw nothing.

There was activity however in the back of the Toyota. Aileen was getting restive.

‘Will ye just look at the time, Dick! Six thirty already and we know why, don’t we? Aye! Poor wee Agnes will have to have some sustenance and soon. We’ll have to stop in Eldoret for a bite before pushing on to Kitale.’

The accent was getting stronger.

‘Right, we’ll find somewhere.’

We rumbled down the main street, eyes peeled for a suitable eaterie. We passed Mama Juicy, the Get In Snack Bar, the Pork Palace, and the Tumbo Fill Restaurant before settling for The Black Horseman, ensnared by the neon-lit logo above the door, depicting a coal black armoured knight, seated on a rearing over-endowed stallion, transfixing a wretched lion on the sharp point of a spear, watched by a leering maiden, with breasts the size of watermelons tumbling unfettered from her decolletage.

Dick parked and stiffly we tumbled out. As we did so a ragged askari sidled up.

‘Mimi ta chunga gari, bwana,’ he told Dick. (I will guard the vehicle, sir.)

‘OK, squire. I’ll give you five bob if nothing is pinched when we come out.’

‘Five bob! Ahhh! Sir! Sir! Give me ten, sir. I am a poor man, sir. What can a man do with five bob?’

‘I’ll give you 7.50 and not a cent more.’

‘Ahh, you are a hard man, sir. Give me the money then.’

‘Chunga kwanza na peza mwisho.’ (Guard first and then the money.)

The Black Horseman belied its flamboyant exterior. The décor was stark, the lighting dim and grim and the furniture, such as it was, unadorned, unwashed plastic. The place was half empty. In a corner a couple of technicoloured tarts sniggered together.

A grubby, bow-tied waiter shuffled forward.

‘Welcome, misters and misses, Karibu! Karibu! (Welcome! Welcome!) Please being seated while I am bringing you the menu.’

The menu suggested that a wide range of delectable, mouthwatering dishes was on offer.

We tried the waiter: ‘Right, we’ll have the grilled trout.’

‘Sorry, we’re out of trout.’

‘OK, then, what about the prawn cocktail?’

‘Sorry, no prawns, bwana. We are too far from the sea.’ He gave a nervous chortle.

Last go.

‘What about the roast lamb?’

‘Ah, we are only having goat, sir. Will you have? Very nice and tender. Mmm!’

‘Definitely not! Just bring a plate of chips, pesi, pesi!’ (Quickly! Quickly!) ‘We’re in a hurry and the memsahib here is not to be trifled with!’

I glanced at Aileen. Her pinched nostrils had expanded until they resembled those speeded up plants in nature films which open with unbelievable rapidity when hit by the rising sun, or vice versa. Whatever the cause, the sight of Aileen’s dilated spiracles had the waiter departing at high speed in the direction of the kitchen.

It did not bring him back at the same speed and after a lapse of 30 minutes Aileen rose and strode with purposeful tread in the direction of the kitchen. The sound of shouting was followed by the explosive entry of the wretched waiter, bearing a large plate of chips, closely followed by a triumphant Aileen.

The chips were revolting: limp, oily and slimy.

We did not tarry and after paying the askari, who examined his palm as though he had just detected the presence thereon of a malignant pustule, were soon on the road to Kitale.

Two kilometres outside the town, a police roadblock brought us to an unwelcome halt.

A battered sign, from which the original paint had all but vanished, requested the harassed traveller to STOP, as there was a police check ahead. Fifty yards further on, the feeble, flickering glow of a hurricane lamp indicated where a double set of road-wide spikes effectively barred onward progress. Here the gendarmes, invisible in their non-phosphorescent uniforms, awaited their prey. And, like most predators, their trap was well-laid. Unless one was aware that a road block lay ahead it was all too easy to come upon it unawares and more than one luckless driver found himself impaled on the spikes, surrounded by irate, but secretly pleased, Officers of the Law. The distance between the spikes was niggardly, just wide enough to allow passage of a moderate-sized vehicle.

Dick coasted to a halt.

‘Best to stop here until they wave you on,’ he said. ‘Creeping forward is an option, but you never know how they’re going to react if you do that. And with the Old Man dying just two months ago these guys are bound to be a bit jittery. We don’t want a sweaty finger slipping on the trigger, do we?’

The Old Man, Jomo Kenyatta, the Father of the Nation, had died in August and everyone was a bit on edge, watching to see how his successor, Daniel arap Moi, would cope.

A large dark figure approached.

Dick greeted it warmly.

‘Evening, officer. What of the night?’

‘Eh? Wat are you saying? Weh, mzungu! Wat are you carrying in here? Where are you going to?’

‘To Kitale and then to Kalokol on the Lake.’

‘Show me yo dliving licence.’

The proffered item was snatched from Dick’s extended hand and scrutinised closely, even upside down. The policeman’s torch was a faint glow, far too dim to read by.

‘Toka, na fungua boot!’ (Get out and open the boot!)

Dick muttered an imprecation, fortunately lost on the threatening presence at his elbow.

‘Wat is all thees?’ Encumbered by his gun, the policeman peered into the back of the Toyota, shoving things aside in an attempt to identify what he was looking at.

‘Food, fishing rods, water, tools, spare tyre.’

‘Give me samthing to keep me wam. We are cold standing here all night.’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘Nipa mimi chai kidogo.’ (Give me a little tea – euphemism for bribe.)

‘Aileen, darling!’ Dick shouted, feigning ignorance. ‘He wants some tea! To keep himself warm! Can you get me some tea bags, my love! Perhaps Darjeeling or Earl Grey?’

‘Ach! Go! Go! Go!’

We went.

Soon we were passing Soy, stamping ground of a small relict herd of Rothschild’s giraffe. As we rumbled along, the moon rose and to the right we could see the rounded outline of the Cherangani Hills.

At Hoey’s Bridge we crossed the Nzoia River. Early settler Cecil Hoey crossed the river by felling a tree across it and so it was named, until renamed Moi’s Bridge, but as far as is known Mr Moi felled no trees across the river.

And so we arrived at Kitale, capital of Trans Nzoia, formerly called Quitale, a relay station on the slave route between Uganda and Bagamoyo on the coast opposite Zanzibar. The site of the slave market is now the Kitale Club and a circle of stones in the car park is said to have surrounded a ring to which slaves were chained at night.

We did not spend the night at the club but at the house of long-time Kitale resident, George Manuel, a welcome haven after the rigours of the day. George always looked as though he had just got out of bed, due to his spiky coiffure, which seemed to have a perverse will of its own, growing in several directions simultaneously, sideways, backwards and forwards.

Ham and eggs, a couple of Whitecaps and we were ready for bed. Even irritable Aileen seemed to have unbent sufficiently to be able to converse in tones which left my eardrums almost intact.

It had rained heavily during the night but the morning dawned fresh and clear and the massive bulk of Mt. Elgon – Ol Doinyo Ilgoon – the Mountain Shaped Like A Breast, unseen during our nocturnal approach to Kitale – loomed mightily over the rising land to the west. An extinct volcano rising to over 14,000 feet, divided between Kenya and Uganda, it dominates the surrounding area, which is fertile and thick with farms growing everything from apples and pears to wheat and maize.

We reloaded the Toyota and set off on the long leg to the Lake.

From now on the road would be all unsurfaced earth, dirt and rock.

As we dropped off the end of the tarmac I could see that attempts were being made to carpet the road and that earthmoving equipment had done a good job of converting what had in all probability been a fairly decent dirt road into something resembling a cross between a tank training ground and a freshly ploughed field. The nocturnal deluge had left long stretches covered in water and the rest was a choppy expanse of sloppy red mud, through which Dick drove the Land Cruiser like the captain of a cross channel steamer leaving port in stormy weather.

By the time we had covered the first few miles the Toyota was no longer jungle green, but rust red with road foundation and the windscreen was layered with a thick patina of the stuff that Maasai like to plaster on their hair. The Toyota springs were stiff and the upholstery unyielding and after Dick had hit a few potholes and I had all but brained myself on the roof as I was catapulted upwards, my thoughts towards the builders of the new road were less than charitable.

My sufferings were to a certain extent dissipated by the passing scene, which was green and pleasant. The peasantry were busy in their fields, the maize was as high as an elephant’s eye and the outliers of the Cherangani Hills formed a pleasant backdrop to the rustic prospect. All sorts of sprightly birds zoomed or cruised hither and yon – herons, ibis, storks, crowned cranes, doves, hoopoes, hawks and hornbills. Now and again with a flash of red and violet a turaco rocketed from one thicket to another. To our right, seldom-seen sitatunga antelope lurked in the Saiwa Swamp. We certainly saw none.

The road itself seemed swampy enough to contain several herds of the semi-aquatic creatures. We ploughed along, swerving to avoid vehicles inconveniently embedded in the mire, grinding through stretches of Passchendaele-like bog, scrabbling frantically to avoid slithering into ditches and watercourses and, on occasion, moving sideways when the vehicle encountered a section more slippery than usual. Dick was one of those drivers who resolutely refused to engage four wheel drive unless absolutely forced to do so. He seemed to consider it unmanly and as a result we were all over the place as he struggled to keep the Toyota on the straight and narrow. Aileen voiced her disapproval from the rear in her high-pitched Aberdonian twang.

Kapenguria was drawing nigh and as it did so road conditions improved, until, by the time we passed the turn off to the town, the mud had gone.

Kapenguria was the remote one horse town in which Jomo Kenyatta and his henchmen were taken for trial for managing Mau Mau, after their arrest by the colonial authorities. According to one violently anti-British American authoress, Kapenguria then had no rail service, hotel, phones, restaurants or courthouse. It sounded most attractive to me.

Beyond Kapenguria we climbed steeply, through pine woods and onto a jutting spur of the Cheranganis. To our left the land fell sharply away into the valley of the Suam River, whose source was in the caldera of Mt. Elgon. The line of the distant river could be seen by following the green vegetation and trees growing along its banks, before it vanished behind hazy blue hills and into the Turkwell Gorge.

Almost immediately the road dropped in a vertiginous swoop down towards the hamlet of Chepareria and the valley of the Marun River and the Marich Pass. The road was rocky and rough. Mud was now a thing of the past. Stones rattled beneath the Toyota as we crashed downwards. To our right the Cheranganis soared coolly upwards to over 11,000 feet. Down in the valley we sweltered in ever-increasing heat. I drew a breath of overheated air and Chepareria was in our rear, a few dusty shacks quickly returning to torpor and lassitude after the brief excitement of our unquiet passage. We did a half circle around the mini-mountain Morobus, crossed the river and clattered ever downwards.

We were now well into the country of the Pokot, formerly called the Suk, a pejorative appellation which did not please them one bit, especially when used by their enemies, such as the Turkana. The Pokot were black, very tough and very traditional, wearing little in the way of clothing, and carrying spears and guns. A naked warrior festooned with bandoliers and carrying a rifle with studied nonchalance on his sinewy shoulder was now a common sight. In the township of Ortum they strolled to and fro among the market stalls, examining the merchandise displayed by their womenfolk, who sat, legs stretched out, before piles of vegetables, water containers, sisal ropes, twists of chewing tobacco, sandals and gourds, their necks loaded with mounds of red and blue beads.

Below Ortum the road narrowed and grew ever more rocky and rubbly, until it was a gravelly thread clinging precariously to a ledge above the right bank of the Marun. Behind us the land soared up and up to the summit of Sondhang, while to our front leapt the mighty mass of Sekerr. The brown river roared and thundered in its bed, falling over waterfalls, curving around huge boulders and rushing down rapids.

The river was progressively squeezed between the mountains until we entered the narrow defile of the Marich Pass, the final barrier before the open plains beyond.

We emerged from the pass and turned sharp left and crossed the river by a suspension bridge, the wooden timbers rumbling beneath our wheels. On the other side we stopped for a break and a bite to eat.

The air was hot, humid and still. Huge acacia trees lined the brown river. Doves cooed contentedly in the branches. The water gurgled musically under the bridge.

Pokot women were dipping gourds and plastic containers into a pool. Others were washing babies. I leaned over the side of the bridge and watched the water carriers who combined sinuous grace with strength and balance, a bit like ballet in slow motion. First the woman would squat down and with one rhythmic movement sweep the container onto her head, following this with an upward uncoiling of her body until she was erect. Then, gliding smoothly across the pebbles and sandy surface of the bank, torso swaying, head virtually motionless, she departed towards her distant homestead.

A group of children appeared and stood silently watching us eat our sandwiches. They did not beg for sweets nor ask for money, a pleasant contrast to their urban counterparts, who would by now be clawing at us, and whining for shillings. Not for the first time I thought that, the further you get away from civilisation, the more civilised do people become.

A column of ants stopped and surrounded crumbs dropped from my sandwich.

A white-bellied go-away bird flew across the river – ‘gaarr, warrr! gaarr, warr! go awaay! go awaay!’

This avian omen was ignored in the interests of progression towards the distant lake and we pressed on northwards into the sandy wastes.

The road ran wide and flat through a dry and desiccated land. Grey scrub, low withered trees, empty expanses of gravel plain, shimmering hills on the distant horizon, all baking beneath a brassy sun in a brassy sky. Despite the seeming total aridity there was sparse life, gleaning sustenance from what seemed to my pampered eye to be the next best thing to total desert. A few fastidious camels were snacking on shrubs which looked as though they had died in the previous century, a flock of goats with wild, yellow eyes nibbled on a sweep of shale, a brace of dik dik peeped out from beneath a pygmy thorn tree and in the quivering distance was the solitary figure of a man, striding across the barren wilderness. There was something noble and brave about that small, dark figure, alone in the desolation, moving with seeming intent and purpose towards some goal, known only to himself. The sight of that little resolute form made me realise that here man had neither been crushed by his surroundings nor had he conquered them. Instead he had adapted his life to his environment and had assimilated what he could from what most people would regard as the worst of situations.

We rattled on.

Innumerable dry watercourses bisected the road at inconvenient intervals, necessitating constant braking and lurching into the sand and over the rocks and up the other side. Complaints about the standard of driving came our way from the upholstered rear.

The sun grew ever higher and the heat was intense. Sitting on the west side of the Toyota I was spared the direct rays but to the east poor Dick was getting the full treatment.

‘Hell, Hugh, man. I’m being fried alive here. Got to have a cold Tusker before I pass out! Let’s stop and open the cool box.’

I concurred readily with this sensible suggestion.

Chilled beer in hand we felt much better and even the road now didn’t seem so bad. A few kilometres further on we snapped open another Tusker. After all in the present heat the beers were not going to remain cool for very much longer and we easily persuaded ourselves that a cold one now would do us much more good than a warm one later on.

Thus it was as we sped, relaxed and happy, over the endless ruts and corrugations, that something flashed by my left window and vanished, wraith-like, into the thin bush.

‘What the hell was that?’ I said to Dick.

‘Search me,’ he replied and then, ‘Shit! shit! shit! Something wrong with the steering! Something very, very wrong with the steering. Bloody hell!’ And from the back came loud screams as the hindquarters of the Toyota did a wild fandango.

I glanced up and about 500 yards ahead saw a camel give a wild skip as I now saw what had zipped so smartly past my window – the left rear wheel, travelling at the speed of Superman.

I clutched my beer to my bosom as Dick fought wildly to retain some semblance of control.

Luckily for us the road at this point was wide with shallow ditches – a bit like a rocky airstrip in fact, but even so I knew that with only three wheels when there should be four our forward progress was going to be severely limited.

And so it was.

With a horrid crunch of metal on rock and stone the left axle met terra firma. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a great shower of sizzling sparks leaping into the red-hot morning, together with a fountain of dust and pulverised gravel. The Toyota swung sharply to the left, but Dick, like a Great War pilot crash-landing his stricken Sopwith Camel, was up to the job. He sharply applied left rudder and steered into wind. We did a three point landing into the shallow ditch and came to a ragged stop.

My beer, I was gratified to note, was unspilt. There’s nothing worse than the stench of sun-dried beer on your only pair of shorts. I took a deep swig. It was still cool. Very nice.

We waited for a few seconds for the dust to clear and then opened the doors and got out. No one spoke. I noticed a go-away bird sitting in a nearby tree, watching us.

The silence was almost palpable. A small waterfall of shattered road fell tinkling from somewhere inside the Toyota’s innards onto the visible upper half of the left brake drum. It hissed gently. The lower half was ground several inches into the detritus of the ditch. The vehicle was tilted so far to the left that the right front wheel was almost off the ground.

I could feel the onset of acute marital discord as Aileen opened her mouth to say her piece.

‘Right, then,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and look for that wheel.’

I had a long way to go, following its track – almost a kilometre. The desert was flat and, apart from the jumping camel, had offered no obstacle to a runaway wheel. The wheel rim was hot and the holes for the nuts were large and ragged. I trundled it back to find Dick and Aileen engaged in bitter dispute.

‘It was your job the check the vehicle. I was getting all the food ready.’

‘I was up to my eyes on the farm. I couldn’t do everything.’

‘I knew that garage was no good. They didn’t tighten the nuts did they? Did they? Now look what’s happened!’

I also looked. The wheel nuts hadn’t just come off. The studs to which they had once been attached, however loosely, had sheared clean off. We had a wheel, but no means whatever of re-attaching it to the vehicle. We were snookered, up the creek in fact, with no paddle or indeed any means of moving under our own steam. We had adequate provisions for the moment but this did not look like the sort of place in which a stay would offer much comfort. I looked around. Nothing but sand and splintered rock and a few spindly trees. Nothing moved. Even the go-away bird had gone.

‘Where are we?’ I asked Dick.

‘About 20km from Lokichar, which is about 80km from Lodwar, which in turn is about 60km from the Lake.’

‘So, still more than 100 miles to go before we see the flesh pots of the fabled Jade Sea, eh? And what’s at Lokichar?’

‘A police station, a couple of dukas and a mission.’

‘Looks like someone’s going to have to go for help?’

There was a silence. I looked up. Three pairs of eyes met mine.

Aileen was the first to speak. The Aberdeen accent was strident and shrill. I could imagine her on the docks, clad in oilskins and gumboots, flogging a tray of cod or haddock to a reluctant crowd.

‘Yes, Hugh, you have to go. I’m a married woman and Dick’s a married man and we can’t send our poor wee Agnes, can we? You’re single and have no family commitments and, besides, you have to atone for arriving late yesterday and making us risk our lives in the dark. Isn’t that so, Dick?’

Dick nodded mutely.

‘You’d better get out on that road to stop the first vehicle that comes along.’

It looked as though I might have to wait a long time, in the heat and the non-existent shade, but half an hour later I heard the distant rattle of springs and suspension stressed to their limits. Out of the shimmering, juddering haze materialised a travesty of a lorry, emblazoned with a sinister logo, Prison Break. I hesitated for a moment before raising my arm, but only for a moment.

The lorry ground to a lumpy halt, covering me in a pall of fine dust.

‘Habari, bwana, naweza saidia?’ (What news, sir? Can I help?)

A large, round black face with a melon-sized grin gazed down at me from the cab.

‘Mzuri, asante. (the news is good, thank you – what was I saying!) Can you give me a lift as far as Lokichar? Our gari has had an accident.’

‘So I see.’ The grin widened until it threatened to disappear round the back of his head.

‘Get up!’ I walked round the front of the lorry and climbed up and into the cab. The tunny boy, sitting there, laughed and moved over and we ground away towards Lokichar.

‘Karibu!’ (Welcome!) he smiled.

Neither man was wearing a shirt and the heat in the cabin was intense.

The lorry was carrying cement and building materials to Lodwar and had left Kitale before we did, so somewhere along the way we had passed it on the road.

‘You passed us coming through the Marich Pass,’ said the driver. ‘Aha! Going too fast! You wazungu have a saying I think – about the tortoise and the hare – ha! ha! – then we were the tortoise! Now you are the tortoise! And we are the hare!’

He threw back his head and gave a great guffaw, to which the tunny boy added his voice. I joined in the merriment, somewhat less enthusiastically.

‘This is a very bad area,’ said the driver. ‘Here the Pokoti and the Turkana meet, and, my word, they are not liking each other! They are always fighting, shooting each side with guns, using spears, stealing their goats and camels and cows. Where you broke down is the very worst place of all. Not too long ago there was a big battle just over that hill you see there. Twenty people killed.’

He shivered dramatically. I felt a trifle chilly myself, despite the heat.

After forty minutes of being bounced up and down like a pea on a drum my spine felt as though it had been re-modelled by a blunt instrument. But it was all in a good cause and I knew that help would soon be at hand once I reached the mission.

The tatty township of Lokichar hove into view – a few ramshackle dukas, the police station, which looked as though paint had not been applied to its outside wall since independence, and the mission. Although it was only late morning every patch of shade seemed to hold its complement of sleepers, crashed out and unconscious, oblivious to our arrival, which, judging by the somnolence of the place, was probably the highlight of the day.

I bade the driver and his mate farewell and walked into the mission compound. I scanned the inscription over the entrance to a large, rather intimidating church –German Lutheran Evangelical Mission. Right then. Whatever you do, Do Not Mention the War.

As I was thus engaged I heard a voice at my side – ‘Ja? Can I be helping you?’

I turned. A large, pale sandy-haired European had crept up on me unawares. He was wearing what looked like a pair of slept-in pyjamas and a crumpled shirt of a nondescript earthy hue. On his feet he wore a pair of yellow socks thrust into a pair of open-toed sandals, whose length and breadth was such that they could have served equally well as snowshoes in the Yukon or as a surfboard on a big curler off Hawaii. He was tall and thin and stood looking down at me, blinking and screwing up his eyes against the light. I noticed that his face was covered in freckles and that his nose was peeling.

‘Yes indeed,’ I said. ‘My friends and I are on our way to the Fishing Lodge at Ferguson’s Gulf. Our Land Cruiser has lost a wheel and we’re stranded about 20 kilometres from here. Do you have a mechanic or any spares to assist us to get the wheel on?’

‘Stranded? Unt in a bad place, I tink. A few veeks ago two European vimen on horses zis way rode, unt de tribesmen speared de horses, unt vun was so bad it had to be shot. So!’

‘Yes, stranded, and in a Land Cruiser like that one over there.’

‘Ja, we are having just such a Land Cruiser, but of spares unt mechanic, nein. But I can for you try to radio ze Fishing Lodge. Let us go to mein haus.’

I almost said ‘jawohl, mein Herr,’ but stopped myself just in time.

The missionary house was a stark stone structure, the floor bare concrete. I followed the missionary into a small room. A few admonitory motifs in German script hung on the walls. At least I assumed they were admonitory – German script is like that.

A bead curtain separated this room from the next.

In that room I could hear the sound of children’s voices. Then the guttural voice of a woman admonishing the children. She sounded as though she had a plug of inspissated sauerkraut stuck in her throat.

‘Mein vife unt kinder,’ said the missionary. ‘I am hafing sex children.’

Vot else did he do in his spare time? I vondered.

In the corner of the room was a table upon which stood the radio for communicating with the outside world. It was covered in a fine layer of dust and it seemed to me that this missionary did not communicate very often.