But already at eight or nine o’clock our own young men and girls of the farm began to hang round the house, in the mysterious way of the Natives aware that great things were about to happen. During the next few hours dance-loving young people from farms further away followed, coming up the long avenue in small groups. Kamante, for once taking an optimistic view of a situation, remarked to me that this was like the time when the locusts came: one by one, then a number together, then in the end more than we would be able to count. At eleven o’clock we heard the car coming up the drive asthmatically. She was all plastered in mud and dust, and Farah himself as he stepped out of her seemed to have faded, in the way of dark people when thoroughly exhausted. I felt that all through these two nights he must have sat up in unceasing palaver with the old Chiefs. Yet at the very first glance we all knew him to have come back victorious.

‘Memsahib,’ he said in a voice almost as hoarse as that of the car, ‘they are coming. They are coming all of them, and they are bringing with them their young men and their virgins.’

They did indeed follow close on the track of the car, swarming, as Kamante had predicted it, locust-like, a stream of supple, fiery young people of both sexes, set on dancing, should it cost them their life. The small groups of an old Chief and his aged counsellors, in rich, heavy monkey-skin cloaks, advanced in state, isolated from the common crowd by ten feet of empty space before and after them.

That night there were between two and three thousand dancers at the dancing-place by my house. The moon was full, and there was no breath of wind, the circle of small fires blazed and glowed a long way into the woods and sent up thin columns of smoke towards the sky. It was a fine Ngoma, I have seen no finer anywhere.

The Prince made the tour of the forest ballroom, stopping to speak to the old Chiefs one after the other. He spoke to them in Swahili, and they, hanging on to their sticks, gave him their answers keenly from smiling, toothless mouths, after which, for obvious reasons, the conversation ceased. He made an impression on the Ancients; afterwards they liked to speak about him. Africans laugh for reasons different from those of Europeans, most often from sheer spite but often also from mere content – for a long time they laughed when they spoke of the Prince, as if we had been discussing a very precious baby. I believe that the Prince himself was pleased with his Ngoma.