Confronted with this kind of dumb, deadly determination in the African, a European in his mind will grope for words in which to formulate and fix it – in the same way as that in which, in the fairy-tale, the man pitting his strength against the troll must find out the name of his adversary and pin him down to a word, or be in a dark, trollish manner, lost. For a second my mind, running wildly, responded to the situation in a wild question: ‘Do they mean to kill me?’ The moment after I struck on the right formula. My people of the farm had come up to tell me: ‘The time has come.’ ‘It has, I see,’ in my mind I assented. ‘But the time for what?’

An old woman was the first to open her mouth to me.

The old women of the farm were all good friends of mine. I saw less of them than of the small restless totos, who were ever about my house, but they had agreed to assume the existence of a particular understanding and intimacy between them and me, as if they had all been aunties of mine. Kikuyu women with age shrink and grow darker; seen beside the cinnamon-coloured Nditos, sap-filled, sleek lianas of the forest, they look like sticks of charcoal, weightless, desiccated all through, with a kind of grim jocosity at the core of them, noble, high-class achievements of the skilled charcoal-burner of existence.

This old woman of the terrace now, in the grip of her left hand, held forth her right hand to me, as if she were making me a present of it. Across the wrist ran a scarlet burn. ‘Msabu,’ she whimpered into my face. ‘I have got a sick hand, sick. It needs medicine.’ The burn was but superficial.

An old man with a cut in the leg from his woodchopper’s axe came up next, then a couple of mothers with feverish babies, then a Moran with a split lip and another with a sprained ankle, and an Ndoto with a bruise in one round breast. None of the injuries were serious. I was even pressed upon to examine a collection of splinters in the palm of a hand, from a climb for honey in a tree.

Slowly I took in the situation. My people of the farm, I realized, today, in a common great resolution had agreed to bring me what, against all reason and against the inclination of their own hearts, I had wanted from them. They must have been grappling with, imparting to one another and discussing between them the fact: ‘We have been trying her too hard. She clearly is unable to bear any more. The time has come to indulge her.’

It could not be explained away that I was being made a fool of. But I was being made so with much generosity.