It is a general notion among Christians that Mohammedanism is more intolerant than Christianity, but such is not my own experience. There were three great prophets – Nebbes – Farah told me, Mohammed, Jesus and Moses. He would not recognize Christ as the Son of God, for God could have no son in the flesh, but he would agree that he had no human father. He named him Isa ben Mariammo. About Mariammo he spoke much, praising her beauty and virginity – she had, he said, been walking in her mother’s garden when an angel had brushed her shoulder with his wing; through this she had conceived. He smacked his own small son Saufe because he repeated some words of abuse about the Virgin which naughty Kikuyu totos from the Scotch Mission had taught him.

When in the thirties I was staying in the south of England with Denys’ brother, the Earl of Winchilsea, the painter John Philpot came down to paint the portrait of my hostess, who was very lovely. He had travelled much in North Africa, and on an afternoon when we were walking together in the park he recounted to me an experience of his from there.

In the First World War, he said, he had had a shellshock or a nervous breakdown; he would never feel sure that he was doing what he ought to do.

‘When I was painting a picture,’ he explained, ‘I felt that I ought to make up my bank account. When I was making up my bank account, I felt that I ought to go for a walk. And when, in a long walk, I had got five miles away from home, I realized that I ought to be, at this very moment, in front of my easel. I was constantly in flight, an exile everywhere.

‘It happened by then that I and my African servant in our travels in Morocco came to a small town or village. I cannot really describe the place to you, it looked like any other North African village. It stood in a flat plain, and in itself it was nothing but a number of mud-built huts with an old, broad mud-built wall round it. The only particular thing that I remember about it is its great multitude of storks, a stork’s nest on almost every house. But at the moment when I had come through the gate in the wall I felt that this was a place of refuge. There came upon me a strange, blissful calm, a happiness like what you feel when a high fever leaves you. “Here,” I thought, “one can remain.”