I myself was in sympathy with the tradition of the Natives, and I instructed Farah – who showed himself deeply averse to the idea, for the Mohammedans wall up the graves of their dead and perform solemn rites by the side of them – if I died on the farm to let me travel in the track of my old squatters across the river. There were so many of the true qualities of the Highland country in the castrum doloris out there under the big firmament, with its wild, free, gluttonous undertakers: silent drama, a kind of silent fun – at which after a day or two the main character himself would be smiling – and silent nobility. The silent, all-embracing genius of consent.

The Government prohibited and put an end to the funeral custom of old days, and the Natives gave it up unwillingly. The Government and the Missions then undertook to build hospitals, and, seeing the reluctance of the people of the land to go into them, were surprised and indignant, and blamed them for being ungrateful and superstitious, or for being cowards.

The Africans, though, feared pain or death less than we ourselves did, and life having taught them the uncertainty of all things, they were at any time ready to take a risk. An old man with a headache once asked me if I might not be able to cut off his head, take out the evil from it, and set it back in its right place, and if I had consented I think that he would have let me make the experiment. It was other things in us which at times set their nerves on edge.

For they had had our civilization presented to them piecemeal, like incoherent parts of a mechanism which they had never seen functioning, and the functioning of which they could not on their own imagine. We had been transforming, to them, Rite into Routine. What by now most of all they feared from our hands was boredom, and on being taken into hospital they may well have felt that they were in good earnest being taken in to die from boredom.