I have had news of another former resident of the farm, the blind Dane, Old Knudsen, who for some time lived in a small house on it, all salted and embittered through the experiences of a tragic life, but with great flaming inner visions to make up for his loss of sight, a grey and bent indomitable optimist.

Last March I had a letter from an American lady of the University of Maryland. A fortnight before, she had been dining with a Danish economist just back from a recent mission to East Africa; they had been talking about me and my book Out of Africa, and he had told her that at the Danish Consulate to Tanganyika he had been given information which he wanted to bring to my attention. When a few days later he had died in his hotel in Washington, Mrs Stevenson passed on this information to me. ‘What he had learned from the Danish Consul,’ she wrote, ‘and what I feel that he would want you to know, was that Old Knudsen’s scheme for extracting phosphate from the bottom of Lake Naivasha was not wild. Some discovery has been made which verifies his theory. I did not get the details, but I feel that you should know.’

Thus, with deep satisfaction, I now see before me Old Knudsen righted, for a while laying down his harp in order to grip old fishermen’s and mariners’ tools, laughing out in triumph over Old Knudsen’s enemies.

I hear, these days, with intervals of one month, or half a year, from my old servants in Africa.

So there they are, out from their coverts in the woods, in the rays of sunset, treading cautiously still, but looking round them more confidently than when they first came into sight, lifting and turning their heads. It is content to watch you so, friends and comrades, I wish you may wander and gaze there, so high up in the air, in the strange freedom of your hearts, for a long time still. You have kept me company through many years; I shall not again frivolously doubt your actuality, I shall, from now, leave to you the rich world of reality. And you may hand me over to those dreams of mine which will take charge of me.

Juma has died. But I have recent news of Ali and Kamante.

Ali writes good English now. He has seen my photograph in the paper. ‘Really and truthfully it makes my heart very much pleased to see your photo. Really and truthfully it fills all my heart with joy when I hear your name spoken. Or when I speak your name.’

As I admire his handwriting and grammar, I sometimes seem to see Berkeley’s little wry smile as in his mind he followed a line of wild duck on the glass-clear sky. And I wonder whether one more of them, fascinated by the decoys below, will here be slowing its flight to drop, in the end, like an arrow-head let off backwards by some heavenly archer, into the water of the pond, in order to become respectable.