The servant may be the more fascinating of the two, still it holds true of him as of his master that his play of colours would fade and his timbre abate, were he to stand alone. He needs a master in order to be himself. Leporello, after having witnessed his scapegrace master’s lurid end, will still, I believe, from time to time in a circle of friends have produced his list of Don Giovanni’s victims and have read out triumphantly: ‘In Spain are a thousand and three!’ The Fool, who is killed by the endless night on the moor, would not have become immortal without the mad old King, to whose lion’s roar he joins his doleful, bitter and tender mockery. Henrik and Pernille, if left by Holberg in their own native milieu of Copenhagen valets and ladies’ maids, would not have twinkled and sparkled as they do against the background of the sedateness of Jeronimus and Magdelone and the pale romance of Leander and Leonore.

I had in Africa many servants, whom I shall always remember as part of my existence there. There was Ismael, my gun-bearer, a mighty huntsman brought up and trained exclusively in the hunter’s world, a great tracker and weather prophet, expressing himself in hunter’s terminology and speaking of my ‘big’ and my ‘young’ rifle. It was Ismael who after his return to Somaliland addressed his letter to me ‘Lioness Blixen’ and began it: ‘Honourable Lioness’. There was old Ismael, my cook and faithful companion on safaris, who was a kind of Mohammedan saint. And there was Kamante, a small figure to look at but great, even formidable, in his total isolation. But Farah was my servant by the grace of God.

Farah and I had all the dissimilarities required to make up a Unity: difference of race, sex, religion, milieu and experience. In one thing only were we equal: we had agreed that we were the same age. We were not able to settle the matter exactly, since the Mohammedans reckon with lunar years.

We wander through a long portrait gallery of historical interest: portraits of kings and princes, of great statesmen, poets, and sailors. Amongst all these one face strikes us, an anonymous character, resting in himself, confident of his own nature and dependent on no one. The catalogue that you take up and into which you look tells you: ‘Portrait of a Gentleman.’ I shall name my chapter on Farah in an unpretentious way: ‘Portrait of a Gentleman’.

In our day the word ‘gentleman’ is taken less seriously than before, or seems to us to have once taken itself a bit too seriously. But so did Farah take himself seriously.