I have told in my book of how I sat and watched Denys and Kanuthia flaying the lion. Going back to that morning after so many years it seems all alive and clear round me, hard to leave once more. I knew then, without reflecting, that I was up at great height, upon the roof of the world, a small figure in the tremendous retort of earth and air, yet one with it; I did not know that I was at the height and upon the roof of my own life. The grass on the slope where I sat was short as a mowed lawn, the Masai having burned it off in patches in order to get fresh grazing for their herds, the Highland air was intoxicating, like wine, the shadows of the vultures ran across my feet. From where I sat I could gaze far away: at a very long distance, by the line of the tall acacia trees somewhat below me, three giraffes came into sight, stood still for a few minutes and walked off. ‘Praise be to thee, Lord, for Sister Giraffe, the which is an ambler, full of grace, exceedingly demure and absent-minded, and carries her small head high above the grass, with long lashes to her veiled eyes, and which is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plain in long garbs, draperies of morning mist or mirage.’

Caption: The author and her Scotch deerhound, Dusk, in the garden at Ngong, 1919

Now it fell out that this lion was an exceptionally fine specimen, what out in his own country they call a black-maned lion, with his thick dark mane growing all back over his shoulder-blades. Denys’ gun-bearer, who had seen many hundred lion-skins, declared this one to be the finest he had ever come across. And as in that same spring I was going on a visit to Denmark after four years in Africa, I took the skin with me and on my way, in London, gave it to the firm of Rowland Ward to be cured and set up.

When in Denmark I told my friends that I meant to give King Christian X the lion-skin, they laughed at me.

‘It is the worst piece of snobbery that we have ever heard of,’ they said.

‘Nay, but you do not understand,’ I answered them. ‘You have not lived for a long time outside your own country.’

‘But what in the world is the King to do with the skin?’ they asked. ‘He does not mean to appear at New Year’s levee as Hercules! He will be in despair about it.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if the King will be in despair, he will have to be in despair. But I do not think it need come to that, for he will have some attic at Christiansborg or Amalienborg where he can put it away.’