I did not know of it until I happened to see him under an attack. I was lying on the lawn in front of the house talking with him and some other totos when all at once he rose up straight and announced: ‘Na taka kufa’ – I am dying, or literally, I want to die, as they say in Swahili. His face grew very still, the mouth so patient. The boys round him at once spread to all sides. The attack, when it came upon him, was indeed terrible to watch, he stiffened in cramp and foamed from the mouth. I sat with my arms round him; I had never till then seen an epileptic attack and did not know what to do about it. Sirunga’s amazement as he woke up in my arms was very deep, he was used to seeing everybody run away when he was seized with a fit, and his dark gaze at my face was almost hostile. All the same after this he kept close to me – I have before written about him that he held the office of an inventive fool or jester and followed me everywhere like a small, fidgety, black shadow. His mighty uncontrolled fantasies and whims were totally confused and highly confusing to listen to. Sirunga, at a time when we had an epidemic on the farm, explained to me that once – long long long ago – all people had been very ill. It was, Msabu, when the sun was pregnant with the moon – walked with the moon in the stomach – but as the moon jumped out and was born, they grew well again. I did not connect his fantasy with hospitals, from which no such universal cure could rightly be expected; it was the words ‘long long ago’ which gave me my perspective.

At the time when the Natives of the Highlands were free to die as they liked, they would follow the ways of their fathers and mothers. When a Kikuyu fell ill, his people carried him out of his hut on his bedstead of sticks and hides, since a hut in which a person had died must not again be lived in but had to be burned down. Out here under the tall fringed trees his family sat round him and kept him company, squatter friends came up to give the news and gossip of the farm, at night small charcoal fires were made up on the ground round the bed. If the sick man got well he was carried back into the hut. If he died he was brought across the river out on the plain, and was left there to the quick and neat cleaning and polishing of jackals and vultures, and of the lions coming down from the hills.