It was a very strange thing that almost at once the words and the gesture seemed to send an effect through him. His terribly distorted face smoothed out, he closed his eyes. After a while he again looked up at me. His eyes were so much like those of a small child that cannot yet speak that I was almost surprised when he spoke to me. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is mzuri,’ and again, ‘yes, it is mzuri sana. Keep it there.’

When at last the car arrived and we got Kitau lifted on to it, I meant to take my seat at the steering-wheel, but at that he immediately worked himself into a state of the greatest alarm. ‘No, Msabu,’ he said, ‘Farah can drive the car, you must tell him to do so. You will sit beside me and hold the Barua a Soldani to my stomach as before, or otherwise the bad pain will come back at once.’ So I sat on the boards beside him, and all the way into Nairobi held the King’s letter in position. When we arrived at the hospital Kitau once more closed his eyes and kept them closed, as if refusing to take in any more impressions. But with his left hand on my clothes he kept sure that I was beside him while I parleyed with the doctor and the matron. They did indeed allow me to keep close beside him while he was laid on the stretcher, carried into the building and placed on the operating table; and as long as I saw him he was quiet.

I may in this place tell that they did really in hospital manage to set his broken leg. When he got out he could walk, even if he always limped a little.

I may also here tell that later on, in Denmark, I learned from the King himself that my lion-skin had obtained a highly honourable place in the state-room of Christiansborg Castle, with the skin of a polar bear to the other side of the throne.

But now the rumour spread amongst the squatters of my farm that I had got this Barua a Soldani, with its miracle-working power. They began to come up to my house one by one, warily, to find out more about it – the old women first, mincing about like old hens turning their heads affectedly to find a grain for their young ones. Soon they took to carrying up those of their sick who were in bad pain, so that they might have the letter laid on them and for a while be relieved. Later they wanted more. They demanded to borrow the King’s letter, for the day or for the day and night, to take with them to the hut for the relief of an old dying grandmother or a small ailing child.