The Governor's Lady Read Free Page B

it. The nuts loosened, and came away. With cries of appreciation and delight, they tried tightening them up again. They succeeded. They forgot why they had started. They undid and re-did. They lost one of the nuts altogether. They quarrelled. Then they remembered the flat tyre. They burst out laughing.
    With a suddenness that was alarming, the sun dipped abruptly behind the distant range of blue hills. As it dipped, it appeared to be accelerating. At one moment it had been floating clear; huge and red and angry-looking. At the next, it was declining so fast that the mountains appeared to be stretching up to eat it. Soon the teeth had done their work, and a large chunk was missing. Then there was only half a sun. Then no more than a flaming rim. Then the eclipse was complete.
    Harold turned towards the drivers.
    â€˜Where do we spend the night?’ he asked.
    The mechanics rose politely to their feet and stood to attention while he addressed them.
    â€˜Yassaar,’ the man in charge answered. ‘Spend the night. Yassaar. Bad wheel. Very bad wheel. Soon drive on now, saar. Spend the night. Yassaar.’
    Harold’s ankle was itching badly by now. Already it had begun to swell.
    The rest-houses on the route proved to be well-spaced rather thancomfortable. They were as pleasant to leave next morning as they had been to arrive at over-night. And there was a sameness about them. The same whitewashed mud walls, and the same corrugated iron roof. The same tin washing-basin set on an enamelled metal tripod, with a bucket underneath it to receive the slops. The same earth-closet. The same hospital-type bed, with its castors resting in saucers of paraffin to discourage the creepie-crawlies. And the same rearing white catafalque of the mosquito-net.
    On his first night under one of them, Harold had learnt to hate all mosquito-nets. Mere heat and stickiness were one thing. Heat and stickiness, plus suffocation and imprisonment, were quite another. In the end, he had kicked his way out in desperation. Wriggled his feet about in the darkness. In consequence his other ankle was now bitten and badly swollen, too.
    Nor had sleep for the past five nights been blissful and unbroken. There had been thunderstorms overhead; howlings and roarings through the surrounding night. And, the dawn-chorus, too, had proved to be uncongenially strident, like Fun Fair music. One particular bird appeared to be following Harold about. Either it, or its twin, had landed on his roof each morning. A large bird with hard feet, it trampled noisily on the corrugated iron sheeting. It whistled. It screamed. It imitated car-brakes. It hooted. It made a sound like corks popping. It laughed. It evacuated.
    But already the journey and the little prison-like rest-houses were in the past. The Chevrolet mounted a small hill with the Government wireless station on the summit. And there, in the plain below, shimmering in the heat, lay Amimbo.
    Harold told the car to stop, and climbed out. He had forgotten about all his tiredness and bad nights by now. He was excited again, remembering that he was the one who had been selected.
    The capital itself was not in the least like the hand-book photograph. That had been in plain black-and-white. Whereas Amimbo itself, even from a distance, was pure Kodachrome. Red roofs. Yellow and green banana-trees. Purple, scarlet and orange of the flowering shrubs. Pale lavender-tinted smoke rose vertically into the still African air. Even the sky was Kodachrome, too. A clear robin’s-egg blue overhead, it changed to indigo in the distance and ended on the far horizon in a bank of battleship grey storm-clouds.
    Even so, the photograph was a help. Harold could identify all the principal landmarks. The railway-station, with its nursery layout of sidings. The Anglican cathedral, looking like a village church in Kent. The gas-holder, recently repainted, and now standing out in its new coat of screaming vermilion. The basilica of the