She remembered when he had opened his palms on the table and said, ‘I went on a trip to Mecca.’ There had been pride in his voice.

‘I should have gone somewhere else for the course,’ he went on. ‘A new place, somewhere down south.’

He was on a plateau, not like her. She was punching and struggling for a piece of paper that would say she was awarded an MSc from a British university. For him, the course was a continuation.

‘Come and see,’ he said, and he held her arm. No one had touched her before, not since she had hugged her mother goodbye. Months now in this country and no one had touched her.

She pulled her arm away. She walked away, quickly up the stairs. Metal steps rattled under her feet. She ran up the stairs to the next floor. Guns, a row of guns aiming at her. They had been waiting to blow her away. Scottish arms of centuries ago, gunfire in service of the empire.

Silver muzzles, now a dirty grey. They must have shone pretty once, under a sun far away. If they blew her away now, where would she fly and fall? A window that looked out at the hostile sky. She shivered despite the wool she was wearing, despite the layers of clothes. Hell is not only blazing fire – a part of it is freezing cold, torturous ice and snow. In Scotland’s winter you live a glimpse of this unseen world, feel the breath of it in your bones.

There was a bench and she sat down. There was no one here on this floor. She was alone with sketches of jungle animals, words on the wall. A diplomat away from home, in Ethiopia in 1903, Asafa’s country long before Asafa was born. It is difficult to imagine anything more satisfactory or better worth taking part in than a lion drive. We rode back to camp feeling very well indeed. Archie was quite right when he said that this was the first time since we have started that we have really been in Africa – the real Africa of jungle inhabited only by game, and plains where herds of antelope meet your eye in every direction.

‘Shadiya, don’t cry.’ He still pronounced her name wrong because she had not shown him how to say it properly.

He sat next to her on the bench, the blur of his navy jacket blocking the guns and the wall-length pattern of antelope herds. She should explain that she cried easily, that there was no need for the alarm on his face. His awkward voice, ‘Why are ye crying?’ He didn’t know, he didn’t understand. He was all wrong, not a substitute …