For a while, after I had published my book Seven Gothic Tales, I considered the possibility of running a children’s hospital in the Masai Reserve. There was much disease among the Masai, mostly such as we had brought upon them; on my safaris I had seen many blind children. But the Masai refused to take their sick to hospital.

The Masai did not like us and had no reason to do so. For we had put an end to their bird-of-prey raids on the agricultural tribes, we had taken their spears and their big almond-shaped shields from them, and had splashed a bucket of water upon the halo of a warrior nation, hardened through a thousand years into a personification of that ideal of Nietzsche: ‘Man for war, and woman for the warrior’s delight, all else is foolishness.’

Once when I was on safari deep in the Reserve, a very old Masai came up and seated himself by my campfire; after a while he began to speak, and it was like hearing a boulder speak. I myself spoke sufficient Masai to inquire about game and water, and no more. For it is to my mind a language impossible to learn, maybe because the course of thought of the tribe speaking it is alien to our own. When on a path in the Reserve you meet a Masai you greet him: ‘Saubaa.’ If you meet a Masai woman you salute her: ‘Tarquenya.’ I have never succeeded in learning what was the meaning of the difference. But on my safaris I had an interpreter with me. ‘Nowadays,’ according to him, the Moran – warrior – of sixty years ago told us, ‘it is no pleasure to live. But in the old days it was good fun. When then the Kikuyu or the Wakamba had got a fat piece of land, and fat herds of cattle, goats and sheep on it, we Morani came to them. First we killed all men and male children with steel’ – the Masai warriors had long, fine spears and short, strong swords – ‘and we were allowed to stay on in the village until we had eaten up the sheep and goats there. Then before going away again, we killed off the women with wood’ – for the Masai also in their belts carried wooden clubs, surprisingly light and effective. I do not know if our old guest was actually calling up a past, or if in his long nocturnal monologue he was picturing to himself an ideal state of things, and was slowly getting drunk on his vision of it. He walked away at last and disappeared into the night, a bald, skinny bird of prey of a dying species.