Farah did not lay his way by the post office. He will have dictated his letters in English himself. They were much like him, gravely and gracefully standing on his own dignity and mine, avoiding any manifestation of pity for any of us. He wrote about a parrot which he had purchased from an Indian friend as a present for me, and which could speak. When, he wrote, he had taught it a few more phrases and names of old mutual friends and acquaintances, if I was not coming back to Africa he would try to get it sent to Denmark. As in the end it proved to be impossible to realize this scheme, Farah gave the parrot to his mother-in-law, who all the time had much admired it, and sent me a few feathers plucked off it to show me what colour it had been. His personal feelings towards me, and the remembrance of our long acquaintance, came out in these letters, suddenly, and as in a new key, in the prayers to God for me preceding his signature.

Through these years I also kept up a correspondence with Abdullahi, my Somali servant, who by now was back in his own country. I have mentioned Abdullahi only very briefly before. Still he had for some years been a picturesque figure on the farm, with his own colours to him. I feel that he ought by now to be brought into the picture.

Abdullahi was Farah’s small brother. He will have been ten years old by the time when Farah decided that the house needed a page more consistent with its dignity than the Kikuyu totos who till now had held the office, and had him sent down from Somaliland. Farah at first had asked for another boy, his sister’s son, but the grandmother of the child, Farah’s mother, had refused to part with him, for he was, she sent us word, of too high value to the tribe on account of his talent for tracking down camels which had strayed away at night. His mother’s decisions to Farah were always unappealable, so it was Abdullahi Ahamed who one day appeared on my doorstep, and who for some years became one with the house.

In order to show his impartiality, Farah treated his little brother with sternness; a couple of times in the beginning of our acquaintance I felt called upon to take the side of the child. But in this, as in much of Farah’s attitude and activity as major-domo, there was a good deal of pose, for the bond of blood to all Somali is supreme and sacred, and when at the time of the Spanish flu Abdullahi lay ill, Farah worried over him like a cat with her kitten. The two together made me think of Joseph and Benjamin, the Viceregent of Egypt laying his hand on the shoulder of the little Bedouin and speaking: ‘God be gracious to thee, my son.’