I made the wood-fellers hold my horse and sent off a runner to the house to have Farah bring out the car, so that I might drive Kitau to the hospital in Nairobi. But my small Ford box-body car was getting on in years; she rarely consented to run on more than two cylinders and indeed it went against her to be started at all. With a sinking heart I realized that it would be some time before she came up.

While waiting for her I sat with Kitau. The other wood-fellers had withdrawn some distance. Kitau was in great pain, weeping all the time.

I always had morphia at hand in my house for injured people of the farm carried up there, but here I had neither the medicine nor the syringe. Kitau, when he realized that I was with him, groaned out dolefully: ‘Saidea mimi’ – help me – ‘Msabu.’ And again: ‘Saidea mimi’ Give me some of the medicine that helps people,’ the while groping over my arm and knee. When out riding on the farm I usually had bits of sugar in my pockets to give to the totos herding their goats and sheep on the plain and at the sight of me crying out for sugar. I brought out such bits and fed Kitau with them – he would or could not move his badly bruised hands, and let me place the sugar on his tongue. It was as if this medicine did somehow relieve his pain; his moans, while he had it in his mouth, changed into low whimperings. But my stock of sugar came to an end, and then once more he began to wail and writhe, long spasms ran through his body. It is a sad experience to sit by somebody suffering so direly without being able to help; you long to get up and run away or, as with a badly injured animal, to put an end to the anguish – for a moment I believe I looked round for some kind of weapon for the purpose. Then again came the repeated clock-regular moaning of Kitau: ‘Have you got no more, Msabu? Have you got nothing more to give me?’

In my distress I once more put my hand into my pocket and felt the King’s letter. ‘Yes, Kitau,’ I said, ‘I have got something more. I have got something mzuri sana’ – very excellent indeed. ‘I have got a Barua a Soldani’ – a letter from a king. ‘And that is a thing which all people know, that a letter from a king, mokone yake’ – in his own hand – ‘will do away with all pain, however bad.’ At that I laid the King’s letter on his chest and my hand upon it. I endeavoured, I believe – out there in the forest, where Kitau and I were as if all alone – to lay the whole of my strength into it.