2

EVERYONE in the capital was working against time. Independence was expected to begin early the next year, and there was an enormous amount still to be done. The administration was trying to train Africans for the take-over and to cope with double the usual amount of work as well. When men returned home late from their offices they were met by worried wives: with the rapid withering of empire ex-colonial officials were now two a penny in England, and unemployment harassed their dreams. Shrieve was shocked by the desperation in the air.

Although he approved of the visit to England, Robbins said that it couldn't have come at a worse moment-he needed every available man to help with what was being bitterly described in the clubs as the winding-up of the estate. No one could be spared to replace Shrieve, but an arrangement was worked out whereby Mackenzie, the officer in charge of the neighbouring Luagabu territory, would visit the Ngulu twice a week.

"It'll be like being one of those United Nations observers," said Mackenzie. "I'll be fired at by both sides."

He was a tall, dark-haired man, with a slight tic in his left cheek. His hand wandered up there when he was conscious of it, massaging his jaw. Where Shrieve loved and cherished, Mackenzie had to tolerate and rule. The Luagabu were often troublesome, and there had been recent outbreaks of violence against white shopkeepers. A Greek general store had been burned, and there had been attempts to blow up all the petrol dumps in the district. For a time martial law had been imposed.

"It didn't help at all," Mackenzie told Shrieve afterwards. "They all go to bed pretty early, so the curfew didn't bother them, and when it came to the system of passes, we just didn't have enough men to make it work effectively in the bush. As for catching the criminal oafs who started the fires ."

"No problems like that with my people," said Shrieve.

"I dare say not," said Mackenzie, stroking his jaw. "Your people's problems start with independence, don't they? There won't be any problems for my lot then, because they'll be running the show. And a pretty fine mess they'll make of it, too."

"One mustn't be cynical."

"It's hard not to be. It's all come too soon, Hugh. If we'd only had another ten years we might have brought on enough people to make a success of it. But there just aren't the capable men yet."

It was a common enough complaint, indeed a standard one in all colonies about to become independent. Frequently half-true, it perhaps applied less in Shrieve's colony than in others. The main tribes had reasonably efficient systems of organisation, and their leaders seemed ready to make the necessary compromises with each other to stop the country splitting apart. The British dictatorship would give way to the dictatorship of the various chiefs and princes in the provinces, while a coalition in the capital tried to maintain some form of loose national unity. Whether the result would be very much worse than what had gone on for eighty years, no one liked to guess. The capital was full of rumours.

Mackenzie came over several times before Shrieve left, and the Ngulu chiefs seemed reluctantly to accept him, though they were acutely suspicious at first because his jeep was driven by a Luagabu. The notion of independence had reached the Ngulu in a very garbled form, and they believed it would be something like one of their festivals, with banquets and many bottles of Free. It proved impossible to get them to understand more than a glimmering of the true situation. When Shrieve tried patiently to explain that he was going away because their affairs required his presence in the white man's big city many miles away, they looked cheerfully blank. Their concept of space was as limited as their concept of time, and there was no point in going into detail about aircraft and ships. Though they had seen pictures of the sea, some of them, they didn't connect it in any way with their river. Shrieve hoped that they wouldn't forget him in the two or three months he would be away.

Mackenzie regarded them with the puzzled air of a bachelor uncle thrust suddenly into a children's game.

"Odd lot, your blokes," he said to Shrieve as they went to the bungalow for some tea.

"They're all right," said Shrieve.

"Oh, don't get me wrong. They're charming, charming. But what the hell are they doing in the middle of the twentieth century? They ought to have died out long ago, surely. They're too damned good to be true. Too good to survive."

"All the more reason that their survival should be insisted upon," said Shrieve, squinting at the porch on which Amy was sitting and fanning herself. She was wearing, he was glad to see, a cotton blouse.

"Oh, of course." Mackenzie accepted it as automatically as Shrieve. He didn't love his tribe, but his sense of duty was quite as strong as the next man's. "Give me a rundown of all the things I mustn't do, will you? I don't want to blunder up against any of their superstitions."

"Well, to start with, do you have to bring a Luagabu driver with you? They don't like the Luagabu."

"Not half as much as the Luagabu don't like them," said Mackenzie. "But I can't drive about alone, Hugh, you know that. It's not safe."

It was true. Although no Ngulu could be trusted at the wheel of a jeep, Shrieve always took one with him when he drove to the town. It was so easy to break an axle or get bogged down in a dry river bed. It wasn't sensible to drive alone.

"No," he said, sighing, "I suppose you can't. But I honestly think that's going to be your biggest difficulty with them. What else? They don't eat any kind of mushroom, God knows why. I once asked Amy to cook me a handful of what the guide says is a perfectly safe and particularly delicious species, and she threw that apron thing over her head-or she would have done if it had been big enough-and wouldn't speak to me for two days. Oh, and don't waste your time asking them why they do or don't do a certain thing, because they'll give you a different answer every time. I've been here over a dozen years and I still don't understand half of what they're up to. But then neither do they."

Amy rose graciously as they arrived and poured out tea. Watching her trying to behave like a white woman, Shrieve wished he had never taught her such garden party tricks. To have done so, he considered, reflected badly on his moral courage. Damn it, he liked her as she was, not giving a gauche imitation of a stage duchess. White visitors could think what they liked. But now it was too late. He had corrupted her.

Mackenzie was as awkward as she, though, which was some consolation, and he blushed when she called him "My dear" as he left.

"What's going to happen to her while you're away?" he said, the tic jerking away in his cheek.

"She's staying, of course, with the children."

"You've got yourself a real problem there, Hugh, haven't you?"

"I dare say I have," said Shrieve vaguely.

Mackenzie shrugged and got into his jeep. He liked Hugh Shrieve, but he felt rather sorry for him.

*

The spring festival went off with an abundance of good omens, as it always did. So many things could be interpreted as good omens that it was inevitable that there should be plenty. This year, too, the hunting party had returned with three antelopes, an excellent bag, especially as one of the beasts was almost young. The Ngulu used bows and finely sharpened arrows, and most of the art of their hunting lay in the stalking. But this magnificent animal, exclaimed the huntsmen, had been shot at a distance of fifty yards. The hunter responsible would certainly be made a chief at the next election, and many songs were sung about his exceptional feat. He was given the honour of cutting the throat of the sacrificial bull while the six chiefs held it down, and when he raised his bloody hands he was loudly applauded. (To have tied the bull, Shrieve guessed, would have been to remove an important ritual element of struggle.)

The Ngulu believed that one of the most powerful gods was a huge bull who wandered about somewhere to the north, in the direction of the game reserve. It was because they held this god in such awe that they never drank cows' milk or ate beef or veal. After the sacrifice, the bull's carcase was sung around, decorated with reeds, and then taken on a solemn march round the village on the shoulders of the chiefs. Afterwards it was dragged into the long grass and left for hyenas and vultures. The skin was worn for a month by each chief in turn.

The feast itself always tested Shrieve to the utmost. He didn't like eating big meals, but he was expected to delight in all the tenderest pieces of antelope, more raw than cooked, and to take large helpings of the many side dishes of vegetables and fruit. There was a particularly nasty Nguluan couscous which he tried unsuccessfully to avoid, and there was a great deal of rough flour over everything which stuck in his teeth. But if the food appalled him, Shrieve enjoyed the stories that were told during the two or three hours of the feast. Anyone could get up and tell any story he liked about gods or men. These tales, like the songs, had their origin in an ancient though frail oral tradition, and because the Ngulu were never very clear about anything the basic themes appeared with many different variations. There was a...