‘Just what I was getting at,’ Piet said. ‘Man-made monuments will crumble and disappear, like the city in the Masefield poem you quoted that day in Gedi, Sarah. But this –’ he waved his outstretched arm over the panorama before them – ‘this has been here for millions of years and will be here for millions more, unless we destroy the whole planet with our giant, mushroom-shaped clouds. If we want to be remembered for what we have done in our own puny moment of time, then we must make the beauty of this earth the heart of our endeavours. Then our efforts will hold, and we might even deserve to be remembered.’

‘And that’s our philosophy lesson for this evening.’ Hannah finished her beer. ‘We’d better be getting back.’

‘Let’s start down the track.’ Anthony took the cool box. ‘And these two can follow us. But if they keep us waiting too long, we’ll leave them to walk home.’

They disappeared into the trees, leaving Sarah and Piet alone. In the blue dusk she could see his eyes shining with love. He cupped her chin in his hands, and kissed her with a tenderness that made her want to cry. Away in the distance came the first whoop of a hyena, calling to his fellow hunters. A chorus came back to him, closer to the ridge than they had expected. Piet took Sarah’s hand, and they were imitating the calls and laughing at the replies as they moved down the rough incline to where they had left the car.

At the house Lottie was on the steps to meet them, her face transformed. ‘I spoke to Janni and he really is coming! He has his ticket and he will arrive in Nairobi on the thirtieth. So, he will be here for the ngoma to celebrate with us all.’

After dinner, Sarah brought out her photographs to show to Lottie, spreading out the Dublin portraits, and the pictures she had taken on the September safari and during her time at Buffalo Springs. She had captured perfectly the raw landscape and the effortless beauty of the Samburu tribesmen with their herds of goats and cattle. Her lens had preserved the light as it caught the spiky stalks of parched grass and turned them into golden rods, their feathery tops dappled with the passage of passing clouds, or shadowed here and there by the wide umbrella of an acacia thorn or a group of doum palms. There were pictures of the plains, with the ferocious points of whistling thorns in the foreground, and the crazy shapes of termite cities rising into the air. But best of all she had caught people and animals in moments of revelation that made them gasp. The last groups portrayed the mourning elephants as they built their cairn.