When I had ridden ten yards, I turned round to look for my dogs. I then saw that a number of people had come out from the huts and were gazing after me. Riding on another ten or twenty yards, I was struck by the thought that this in my squatters was an unusual behaviour. In general, unless they wanted something from me and would shout for it – as the totos, popping from the long grass, screeched out for sugar – or wanted just to send off a friendly greeting; ‘Jambu, Msabu!’ they let me pass fairly unnoticed. I turned round again to have another look at them. This second time there were still more people standing on the grass, immovable, following me with their eyes. Indeed the whole population of the manyatta would have got on their legs to watch Rouge and me slowly disappearing across the plain. I thought: ‘They have never till now seen me cry. Maybe they have not believed that a white person ever did cry. I ought not to have done it.’

The dogs, having finished their investigation of the various scents of the manyatta and their chasing of its hens, were coming with me. We went home together.

Early next morning, before Juma had come in to draw the curtains of my windows, I sensed, by the intensity of the silence round me, that a crowd was gathered at short distance. I had had the same experience before and have written about it. The Africans have got this to them – they will make their presence known by other means than eyesight, hearing or smell, so that you do not tell yourself: ‘I see them,’ ‘I hear them,’ or ‘I smell them,’ but: ‘They are here.’ Wild animals have got the same quality, but our domestic animals have lost it.

‘They have come up here, then,’ I reflected. ‘What are they bringing me?’ I got up and went out.

There were indeed a great many people on the terrace. As I kept standing silent, looking at them, they, silent too, formed a circle round me; they obviously would not have let me go away had I wanted to. There were old men and women here, mothers with babies on their back, impudent Morani, coy Nditos – maidens – and lively, bright-eyed totos. Gazing from one face to another I realized what in our daily life together I never thought of: that they were dark, so much darker than I. Slowly they thronged closer to me.