“Then, one afternoon, we dropped into the heart of a storm--tropical thunder, tropical lightning, skies blacker than you’ve ever seen, a wind that churned the heavens into a pot of inky broth. I had been wondering, for days, what we should do when we struck something besides the eternal huddled villages of the natives, with their tobacco-plots and mealie-fields, their stupid curiosities, their impudent demands for gifts--something more like a house, people you could count people, with a touch of white in their complexions. Strange coincidence, that it was by the real lightning-flash that, for the only time in my life, I saw her clear; strange, too, that the revelation should have come on the heels of our first approach to anything like civilization. It was only the plantation of a man who had made his little pile by trading in Kimberley, and had trekked up to the edge of the wilderness to live there in peace with his aged wife, and his cattle, and the things that without too much trouble he could coax out of the good-humored soil. His establishment was the first earnest of European activities seething somewhat to the southward; the first reminder of Europe that we had had since leaving the last Portuguese outpost on the way to the Nyassa. The trip had not been hard, as such trips go: we had run into no wars; no famine or drought or disease had visited us. We had been in luck; for I was a shocking amateur, and anything like a real expedition I could not have managed, of course. Yet, even so, I had been straining my eyes for the sight of a white man; for some form of life that more nearly suited my definition of ‘colonial.’ “And so we stumbled into his compound at eight in the evening, after endless floundering about in the storm. We had had to dismount from our donkeys and lead the frightened beasts by the bridle. Eventually we could discard them for horses or oxcarts, but for a little while still we might need them, and we clung to them, though the temptation was to let them go--with a kick.”