She spent the afternoon reading Dan and Allie’s latest records, and preparing her notebooks and cameras for the following day. Allie had arranged that she and Sarah would spend the next few weeks watching a new group, getting to know the elephants by their individual marks and habits. After dinner, when she returned to her rondavel, she opened her suitcase and began to stow her clothes and books on their customary shelves. As she was putting her pencils and notebooks into the drawer of her desk, her fingers touched a bulky shape. When she took it out, her limbs turned to lead. Folded carefully into the packet were all the letters she had written to Piet during her first weeks at Buffalo Springs. A continuous conversation with him, documenting in prose and in sketches all the miraculous discoveries of her first experiences at Buffalo Springs. There were descriptions of animals and the people, drawings of flowers and trees and birds, words that revealed her thoughts, her most fervent hopes and her overpowering love for him. She had not sent them to him, because she had not known whether he truly loved her. And they were too personal a testimony to offer as a friend. When he asked her to marry him she had decided to put them all together into an album, with a collection of her best photographs, and to give them to him on their wedding day. She sat down at her desk and read each line slowly, dwelling on the way she had always felt that he was beside her in those early days. She remained in her chair, holding the shreds of her dreams in her hands, until the sun rose and offered her another day.

A week after her return, a safari car drew up outside the fence of the compound, and George Broughton-Smith got out. It was amazing, Sarah thought, how he could arrive in a cloud of dust and emerge as fresh and well groomed as ever. Just like Camilla. He looked tanned and fit and his linen shirt was rolled up at the sleeves.

‘I’m sorry to arrive without warning,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in Samburu, looking around and talking to the warden about their problems. I knew you were here, Sarah, and I very much wanted to see you. I’m so very sorry about what happened at Langani. I know you had just become engaged to that terrific young man. There’s nothing I can say that would be adequate. I’m just so sorry.’

‘I’ve only been back at work for a few days,’ she said, knowing that she would begin to scream out loud if one more person mentioned how sorry they were. What use was their sorrow now that Piet was gone for ever? But his offering of consolation was genuine and she saw that he had been appalled by the tragedy that had overtaken her.