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Five years before the beginning of this adventure, James Antrim had been seconded from the Indian regiment to which he belonged for a term of service with the King’s African Rifles at Nairobi. It was a pleasant life that he came to, and the only one that he understood; for in those days, before the penetration of Jewish shopkeepers and Christian landsharks which has given the town a flavour of the Rand, the atmosphere of Nairobi was, as near as may be, that of an Indian hill station. Its social traditions were those of Indian official life; its inhabitants, soldiers and civil servants, members of two connected castes, speaking the same language, accepting the same conventions of behaviour and the same code of sport.

A good life ... Antrim—Jimmy, as everybody called him—could not have asked for a better. First, he was a keen soldier—heredity answered for that—and the K.A.R. of those days was a crack corps of magnificent physique tempered by the fires of war that still smouldered in every border of the colony. He was proud of his men, and, being born to the job, he soon came to know them and like them as well as his own Pathans. Next, he was a born sportsman; and this was the best country in the world for sport. One could shoot lion within an hour’s ride of Nairobi; there was a racecourse with two annual meetings, a pack of hounds that hunted jackal, a polo ground. No man of his kind could complain.

He lived comfortably in the K.A.R. Headquarters mess on the brow of Nairobi Hill, within a stone’s throw of his lines. If, at sunset, he passed through the wide alley of the cantonment between the rows of thatched bandas that his men inhabited and saw the blue smoke curling upward while the askaris’ women moved between the huts swathed in their long printed cloths, he accepted the whole exotic scene without questioning or wonder. To him it was just part of the daily life. Even when he passed through the length of the lines and stood for a moment on the edge of the escarpment, seeing beneath him the green sea of the Athi Plains, or, perhaps, the gleaming cone of Kilima N’jaro, he didn’t realise that he was in Africa, or think of the desperate adventures of the men who had pushed inward before him, through the veldt of fever and the Taru jungle to plant this station on the edge of the hills. Aldershot or Pindi or Nairobi: it made no difference in this life of bugle calls and parades. Nairobi was just a station, like any other, in which he would serve his time and then pass on. The green plain beneath him was just the game-reserve, a reservoir of magnificent shooting, made for the sport of men. Kilima N’jaro? Kilima N’jaro was in German East, and did not concern him. He would not wait to see its cone loom greater, dominating all the South, for, between six o’clock and half-past, the sun would set, and at this hour all sensible men made tracks for the club or for the ante-room, that they might get in a rubber of bridge before dinner. He played bridge well. For every game in which the muscles or brain of one man were pitted against those of another he had a kind of clear, instinctive aptitude. Other men liked to play with him, for he was a generous winner and a good loser.

This was the time of day when women emerged with their cool dresses, fragile and seductive in the twilight; but Antrim never bothered his head about them. Poodle-faking was a subaltern’s game. He had learnt all he wanted to know about it years ago in India, at a station too hot for any other amusement, and emerged from this tuition with a profound distrust. Not, for one moment, that he was insusceptible. It was a game for which he had an aptitude as marked as for any other. The trouble, to his mind, was that it was a game without rules—or rather that women, in his experience, wouldn’t stick to those that he accepted. The theory that all was fair in love and war offended him. It had been part of his training to absorb the rules of the Geneva Convention in one, and he looked for its equivalent in the other. In vain, of course; for women, who wouldn’t sneak a point at tennis for the world, were apt, in matters of sex, to argue with the umpire. What was more, he had invariably found them bad losers. With one loser, in Mau, he had had a hell of a time; and another, a winner, had wiped her feet on him in Poona. It wasn’t good enough. That was why he preferred bridge ... and male bridge at that.

For this reason he came to Nairobi with a reputation for “difficulty” among women. Throughout the whole of his service there he lived up to it; and this was confusing to hostesses who were simple enough to be led by his perfectly delightful manners into the idea that they had made a conquest. There wasn’t a woman in Nairobi who could complain that Jimmy had ever been rude to her, nor yet one who could boast that he had been attentive; and this was not for want of opportunities of either. A waste of the very best material; for in many ways he was attractive to women; in his air of perfect physical efficiency, his reputation for good sportsmanship, his breeding, and, above all, his voice, which was low and strong with the inflections rather than the accents of a brogue.

Perhaps it was a feeling of disappointment, long suppressed, that made the outcry which raised itself against his first adventure at N’dalo so bitter and so prolonged. To Antrim himself it was also inexplicable, for he had left B.E.A. after five years of service with the battalion, to all intents a popular figure. Certainly no man could have asked for a better send off. He didn’t suppose that he would ever see Nairobi again; but as he left it he felt more kindly towards it than to any station in which he had served.

In after years he was often to remember that downhill journey to the coast. He had never been fitter in his life; he was modestly conscious of a job well done, and sure of a first-rate confidential report on his service. In front of him lay the prospect of six months’ leave. What he would do with it he didn’t know. It was enough to be sure that he would be in Ireland for the white trout and the grouse, and six months was a deuce of a time in any case. Three days at least he must spend in Mombasa waiting for his boat; but that, on the whole, would be rather fun, for he was booked to spend it with the provincial Commissioner Kilgour, another Irishman whose house was the oldest quarter on the island, overlooking the harbour in which he could swim at dusk. In the daytime, perhaps, he would have a go at trolling for baracuta. And sleep. After the altitude of Nairobi it would be hard to keep awake at the coast.

By the time that he had reached these pleasant determinations the train was running fast through the game reserve and his eyes became watchful. It was good to see them, those great straggling herds of antelope on which he would never set eyes again, unless, indeed, he should some day take another trip from India on long leave. It pleased him to reflect that he could see nothing to touch the collection of heads that he was bringing home with his luggage. He thought lovingly of the record Roan that he had stalked and shot at N’joro six months before; and with this there came into his mind the memory of many golden days on those rolling highlands.

When they ran into Kiu in the early evening and were turned out at the Dak Bungalow for tea, he realised that he was saying good-bye to these happy hunting grounds; for at this point the climate of the highlands ends and the line begins its long descent to the sea. It wasn’t like Antrim to be sentimental, and yet, when he had bolted his boiled eggs, he stood on the platform looking backward over the rising plateau, so vast, so piercingly green after the greater rains; and in that moment Africa, that old enchantress, sealed her claim on him. He didn’t know it. He just hung on to the platform as long as he dared while the pump of the engine wheezed like a winded roarer; and, when the train started, he watched in a dream the wide park-steppe unfolding its slow panorama—flat-topped acacias, of the kind that giraffes love, and stony shallow dongas whose bush might shelter a lion—watched it eagerly, jealously, till night swooped down like a bird of prey, a pitch-black night, in which he could only smell, seeing nothing but the engine’s flying sparks, hearing nothing but the rumble of the coaches.

And he thought: Well, this is good-bye. This is the end of Africa for me. I’m still in it, but every moment I’m moving away from it. Funny how a damned shenzi country like this gets hold of one! There’s nothing much to it that one can see except the game. But there it is! That’s the way of life. You live in a place for four years, just rub along and put up with it, and when you move on to another you could kick yourself for not having made the most of it. All through that evening he was thinking more of Africa than of Connemara.

In the middle of the night (as it seemed) they pulled up at Tsavo. A railway babu in a frockcoat and turban strutted up and down the platform swinging a hurricane lamp, as though he owned the place. “Fancies himself a hell of a bahadur,” Antrim thought. “This country’s no place for Indians. You can see why the Africans hate ’em!” He thought lovingly of his own askaris, and while he gazed out into the dark that possessed the wilderness on every side, he heard the shrilling of frogs and smelt the aroma of the dry bush blowing in at his window. “Lions,” he thought. This was the place where one of the railway-wallahs shot some man-eaters. It was all very well to shoot lions; but no one had any business to make a song about it. He yawned. He remembered passing through the same station on his way up-country. If it had been light he could have caught a last glimpse of Kilima N’jaro. Now he would never see the Mountain of the Spirit again. A pity....

Why it was a pity he couldn’t for the life of him say. Twelve hours before, such an idea wouldn’t have entered his head. He cursed the voice of the officious babu who had wakened him. When the train moved on he couldn’t get to sleep. He wasn’t at all sure that this railway coach, seconded, like himself, from India, wasn’t infested with bugs. At least the railway people might give one a decent light.

Lying there awake and, as it seemed, less and less likely to sleep, his thoughts became possessed by the fantastic idea of cancelling the passage he had taken, throwing up the idea of Europe, and spending his six months’ leave in Africa. It might be his last opportunity, and, in any case, he could never again do it so cheaply. He calculated the saving of fares, the money that he was bound to blue in London, and set it off against his balance at Grindlay’s. Supposing he fitted up a small safari in Mombasa and started down South, over the German border into new country.... The idea was ridiculous, but he couldn’t banish it from his mind; and at last surrendered to working out its details. It passed the wakeful time as well as watching sheep go through a gate; but when once he had admitted the project to his thoughts, his brain began to work so clearly and with such enthusiasm that he was astonished. It was as if the plans had lain hidden, ready-made, in some dark region of his consciousness, and this impressed him with the suspicion that there might be something in it.

In matters of this kind he was a little superstitious. He believed in the rightness of instinct, and felt that if he neglected the impulses that it prompted he might live to regret it. And, indeed, when he came to think of this change of plans as possible and not as a fantastic speculation, it had its points. The aspect of it which appealed to him most was not so much that it implied the recovery of lost opportunity (though this, no doubt, was its origin and its excuse), as the fact that all spheres of adventure in this small world were contracting day by day. Twenty years ago the whole of the country through which the train ran clanking in the night had been unexplored. Now its transit was as unadventurous as a run from Paddington to Plymouth. Further south the Germans were already building two railways. In ten years’ time there wouldn’t be a spot uncharted on the map of Africa. Supposing that he stuck to his original plan and made another visit on long leave from India? The odds were that by that time all accessible country would have lost its virginity and, therefore, be useless to his fastidious taste. “If I don’t go now,” he told himself, “I might just as well not go at all. Damn it, why shouldn’t I go now?”

His sister Honoria, down near Athenry, would be disappointed not to see him. Honoria was married and had two children. She was said to be happy, and told him so herself. So she should be, for she’d got what she wanted. He didn’t know Honoria’s husband; but he had heard hints that he was a Nationalist, and if once he started talking politics there’d be the devil to pay. That three months’ visit to Athenry was a risky business, though Honoria, poor old thing, didn’t guess it. And if he were not going to stay for three months with Honoria, why, in heaven’s name, was he going home?

He began to reckon the pleasures on which he had counted, trivial, ridiculous things: the prospect of a hair-cut at Guy’s under the skilled hands of the old fellow with the mutton-chop whiskers who always remembered him.

“Pleased to see you, Captain! (He always called him Captain.) Back from India, as usual?”

And himself: “No, Africa this time—East Africa.”

“Ah, yes, the Gold Coast. Isn’t that what they call the White Man’s Grave? Though, I must say, sir, you don’t show it. You’ll find London greatly changed. We don’t change much here.” A chuckle. “Friction, of course, sir?”

A visit to his tailor’s. The vanity of stepping out into Piccadilly in well-cut mufti, just as if he’d never left it. The trees of the park in the pale green of spring. The smell of a May shower on London dust. A dinner at the Rag with his cousin Harry Persse. Good things all of them—yet only good by contrast. He and his friends would talk together of old times, old names, old faces; but, if he were to tell himself the truth, he knew that Persse didn’t care a button for him. Harry’s life was not his. He didn’t know Harry; that was the truth of the matter. And he didn’t know Honoria either—much less her husband.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea, he decided, to send her his heads in place of himself. No doubt they would look topping in the hall; and, as a matter of fact, he had nowhere else to store them. He didn’t suppose she really wanted him, and, if she did, she could console herself with the colobus monkey skins, black and white, that he had shot up Kijabe mountain. Make a muff of them; or tippets for the kids—if modern kids wore tippets. Poor old Honoria! It was all very well to think about her; but the pleasure and the pity that he got out of it were equally sentimental. Really, they were strangers.

When he came to think of it there was nobody in his life at present who wasn’t a stranger. It had been his rule to cultivate the pleasant superficial relationships that were necessary to his army career, and to leave it at that. Much better all round. You expected less of people and weren’t open to disappointment, and the men at headquarters decided you were a sound fellow. What was more, it allowed you to lead your own life. If there was any point in living one’s own life ... three-score years and ten. “Too deep, my friend! Ask me another,” he thought.

It was a bad thing, he told himself, just as Honoria would have told him, to cut oneself off from the graces of life. It was necessary, so to speak, to be inoculated with the germs of civilisation once in every so many years. Otherwise one felt a barbarian and found oneself speaking a different language from one’s peers. His mind rebelled against this suggestion. “The truth of the matter is,” he told himself, “we do all these things for women. Fashions in manners; fashions in words. It’s a kind of sexual tyranny! And since there’s no woman in the world that I particularly want to please—— Besides, if ever I want to marry, the woman will be above such trifles, and I’ve yet to meet her.”

He saw, rather grimly and quite unjustly, the pale women of India: a flight of white moths fluttering out in a warm dusk. His resentment rose against them “Dictating the whole behaviour of the Indian Empire! Coming out at night like a lot of cocottes!”

In this state of mind he couldn’t even make allowances for climatic conditions; he couldn’t see that the delight of his mind in these savage generalisations was a token of weakness rather than of strength; but in that moment he had remembered the woman at Poona, and thought no more of Africa. The train had reached the thorn desert of Taru before he fell asleep.