Abdullahi’s period of service in the house was marked by one dramatic event. I had been ordered by the doctor to take six drops of arsenic in a glass of water with my meals. When one day at lunch I had forgotten to do so and sat reading in the library, I asked Abdullahi to prepare and bring the dose, took the glass from him without looking up from my book, and at the moment when I drank down its contents realized that it must have been filled with pure arsenic. I asked Abdullahi about it, and he told me, stiffening, that it was so. I did not feel ill at the time, only strangely stunned, as if I had received a blow. ‘Then I think that I shall die, Abdullahi,’ I said, ‘and you must send Farah in to me.’ Later on, Farah told me that his little brother had come rushing into his house, had cried out: ‘I have killed Memsahib! Go in to her, you! And goodbye to you all, for I am going away and am never coming back,’ and with these words had vanished. By the time when Farah came, I myself had really begun to believe that I was going to die. I made him carry me on to my bed, and my agony there grew worse and lasted for more than twelve hours. I had no knowledge of arsenic poisoning and no instructions in my books of how to treat it. But after a while I bethought myself of Alexandre Dumas’ novel La Reine Margot, which I had got in the house. This book tells of how treacherous enemies of King Charles IX smear the pages of a book on stag-hunting with arsenic, so that the King, continuously wetting his finger to turn them, is slowly poisoned, and it also mentions the remedy by which the physician-in-ordinary tries to save the King’s life. I had Farah find Queen Margot on my bookshelf, managed to look up the cure of milk and white-of-egg used, and started upon it, Farah lifting up my head so that I might swallow the medicine. In the midst of the treatment I remembered having been told that great quantities of arsenic will turn the patient a livid blue. In case it was really so, I reasoned, it was hardly worth struggling for life, so I sent for Kamante and had him stand by the bed, from time to time holding up my mirror to me. About midnight I began to think that I might after all remain alive, and about dawn to wonder about how we were to get Abdullahi back. Only after three days did the Masai scouts set on his track bring him in, the picture of a run-down, stunned scapegoat pardoned back from the desert.

When Abdullahi had been with me for three or four years, an event, small in itself, changed his fate.