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By Root 948 0

shot up the clear blue of the sky, the light was coming flickering through the tree-trunks and laying black bars over coloured dust; and, turning a corner, the glow was so intense it burned out the softness of small foliage up tall grass stems. The grass on a turn of the road was ten feet high, still stiff with sap; and each stem glittered a pale, clear red, like a forest of fine tinted wires; and the tree-trunks behind showed black and still against the flare of red, the roughness of bark swallowed in substance of shadow. Fine perpendicular grass stems; straight rising trunks, and, above, the flat-layered branches of the bushveld, black with glowing edges—a springing upwards of a myriad sharp lines, backed with soaring trunks; and, above, the blocking horizontal masses of the branches.

And then the big red sun dipped under, and there was an exquisite afterglow, warm and nostalgic and clear; and the air was sweet with hot dust and hot leaves and warm grasses.

Soon it was dark; the lights of cars showed miles away, dipping through the bush, or shining up in a wide, white dazzle over the farther side of ridges. And the road was very bad; and we hoped that soon an ugly little roadside bar-hotel would show itself; or at least, I did; for I wanted to sleep again beneath a corrugated-iron roof, and hear it sing and crackle as the night-chills fought in the metal with the day heat.

Then, where the map said we could expect Karoi, a big white hotel rose three-cornered on the road, shining with car lights and strung with little coloured bulbs.

So the car was left in a rank parked solid with cars and we went into a fine modern hotel, full of farmers in for an evening’s relaxation, and travellers going north and south. The verandah was pleasant to sit and drink on, looking as it does on to a little court edged with flowers and decked with more coloured lights strung over white walls, reminding me of a hotel I once stayed in in Spain, which had exactly this air of warm moon-lit laziness, and even more because of the women wearing bare-armed linen and cotton dresses, and moving with the indolence of hot weather.

The dinner was disagreeable because there was a middle-aged lady at the table from Kenya. She said she was leaving Kenya, where she had lived most of her life, because things were so bad there. Mau Mau? But no; the natives were under control again; it was the Indians, she said; the Indians all over the place; and Indians and natives coming into the bars now, and even to eat in some of the hotels. They had a bad type of Indian, she said, they were traders, and always speaking up for themselves. And now they were even asking for land; they were getting uppity. Who ever heard of Indians being farmers?

Perhaps in India, it was suggested, it could be said they were farmers. ‘Then why don’t they go back there? We don’t want them.’ But the Government was soft. It was soft with the Kaffirs and it was soft with the Indians. Look what it did with Mau Mau. Giving in to Britain as usual—our men knew how to deal with the natives, but the British troops had different ideas, and look at the fuss in Britain over nothing, the Kaffir never did understand anything but a good hiding. And she was going to live in Southern Rhodesia, which was the only civilized country left. South Africa was no good because of the Nationalists, and Northern Rhodesia was a Kaffir country, but Southern Rhodesia was still a British country, thank heavens for that at least.

After this, we followed the advice of the management, and decided to spend the evening in the drive-in cinema at the back of the hotel. Drive-in cinemas are now rapidly becoming a major feature of life in the southern half of the continent-naturally, since it saves one from being parted from one’s car too early in the evening.

But I admit it seemed odd to find one in Karoi, which must be (if I remember it right) about 170 miles from Salisbury, and another 150 from the Zambezi; it is a little station stuck in the bush.

We took the car round to the back of the hotel, and there drove it up the