‘Maybe we should go to bed,’ Sylvie said. ‘Before we’re eaten alive.’

‘Good idea,’ he said.

To my disappointment, Rupert just shrugged.

We crawled into our tents. Outside, I could hear the totos clearing away our whisky glasses, putting more branches on the fire and going to bed. They didn’t have tents, just a sheet each to sleep under.

Then the sounds of the forest – the shrieking of insects, the chattering of monkeys and the cry of an African wood owl. Once I thought I heard a lion cough, and my body tensed up, but I didn’t hear it again and eventually I fell asleep.

The next morning, I opened my tent flap and lay back under my warm blankets, watching the changing scene.

Dew clung to the grass in fat orbs and when I breathed tiny drops of water swirled in a cloud above my head. At first the sky was a grey strip above the treetops, but gradually it filled with hazy colour, pink, then copper, then golden, then the treetops gleamed gold too, and the birds yawned, shook themselves, and burst into song.

The fire was still crackling softly, and every so often the smoke drifted towards my tent, smelling like autumn back in Scotland, when the gardeners would build bonfires to burn the fallen leaves. It mingled with the smell of mimosa and earth and the coffee that the totos were preparing for us.

Sylvie stood at the entrance to my tent and laughed at me. ‘You’ll never be a great hunter, lying in bed all morning,’ she said.

I pulled on a jumper and crawled out. ‘I didn’t hear the others leave.’

‘They went before sunrise.’

She set out two canvas chairs around the fire and we sat. She kicked off her shoes and tucked her feet underneath her. ‘There’s something about sleeping outdoors that makes me hungry,’ she said.

‘Me too.’

She lit a cigarette, bending her long neck towards the flame in her cupped hand. She was most beautiful in the middle of nature, I thought, fresh-faced and bathed in sunlight, her hair swept back from those high cheekbones.

I left my chair and picked some wild flowers, presenting them to her in a colourful bouquet. ‘For my lady.’

‘Flowers at breakfast,’ she said, and sniffed them. ‘Heavenly.’

The totos brought us coffee and porridge and bananas and we ate in contented silence. Butterflies danced around our heads in crimson and orange and green. Sylvie looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup, eyes laughing. I wondered at how, just over a year ago, I’d sat with her in the bar by Mr Sand’s market, completely tongue-tied.

‘I think I might go back,’ she said, when we’d finished.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want to hunt.’

‘That’s the only reason?’

‘Well …’ She laughed. ‘You’ll think I’m crazy.’

‘The vultures?’

‘Yes.’