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inches from the ground.
    “Gee up,” Wheech-Browning ordered, and the mule obediently started walking in the direction of Taveta. Temple tried to stop himself from smiling at the ridiculous sight.
    “Seems fine,” Wheech-Browning shouted over his shoulder. Then, “Oh, by the way, can you drop in and see me some time next week?”
    Temple frowned. “Why?” he called.
    “Those coffee seedlings from German East,” Wheech-Browning yelled. “You’ve got to pay me the customs duty on them.”
    Temple was still cursing Wheech-Browning when he came in sight of his farm some thirty minutes later. ‘Smithville’, as he grandiosely referred to it, did not present an attractive aspect to the eye. His house was built on a small hill; or rather, it was being built. The two storey wooden frame house had been incomplete now for over two years. The ground floor, consisting of a dining room, sitting room and kitchen, was in working order, but only two of the three bedrooms on the floor above were habitable. The third bedroom, above the kitchen, had walls, a floor, but no roof. It had been left incomplete not so much through want of funds or building expertise but through lack of energy, all of that commodity having been claimed by and directed towards the construction of the sisal factory which, unfortunately for the house, still remained the centre of Temple’s world.
    From the house the land sloped gently away towards the small patch of water—some two miles distant—that was Lake Jipe. Across the border in German East (which ran beyond the lake) rose the Pare hills, along whose other side Temple had travelled that morning in the train from Bangui to Moshi.
    At the moment Temple’s farm was divided into plots of sisal, with their great spiky leaves like hugely enlarged pineapple crowns, and fields of linseed plants. At the foot of the hill on which the house stood was the ‘factory’. This was a large corrugated iron shed which contained Temple’s pride and joy: the Finnegan and Zabriskie sisal ‘Decorticator’, a towering, massive threshing machine that pulverized the stiff sisal leaves into limp bundies of fibrous hemp. A smaller shed beside it contained smaller, more domestic-sized crushers for processing the linseed berries. Grouped around this central nub of the ‘factory’ were other shaky lean-tos, relics of failed enterprises of the past.
    A large number of fenced-off wooden pens had served first as a pig farm, which had flourished for nine months before swine-fever had decimated the entire herd in a fortnight. Undeterred, Temple had immediately adapted the enclosures for ostrich farming, raising the fencing until it stood six feet high, and taking out some of the intervening walls. He had bought thirty ostriches at considerable expense and had been looking forward to his first harvest of feathers and the outcome of his breeding efforts—eight huge eggs had been laid by the hens—when disaster struck for the second time. One night a pride of lions had broken in and killed every bird. The ostriches trapped in their corral had been absurdly easy prey, their long necks an inviting target and broken with one swipe of a paw or crunch of teeth. Temple could still recall the shock of witnessing the result of the massacre, standing knee-deep in feathers, surrounded by his ravaged, mangled flock. Ostrich farming had proved a costly failure. All the recompense he had received was a week of superb omelettes—for breakfast, lunch and supper—as he and his family had sadly eaten their way through the clutch of eggs.
    All the same, Smithville had survived, sustained by the reliable but boring sisal and linseed. Temple had invested in the Decorticator as much in an attempt to liven up the business of farming as to save him the processing fees he had to pay if the hemp was made at Voi. Theoretically, his forty acres of sisal did not warrant the erection of the factory, but it had swiftly become one of the most exciting and