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filters and had to be scrubbed off to allow the water to pass more quickly. It was a
    dirty job and not one which I enjoyed very much.
    Katundi had already pulled the filters out of the water when I joined him. Together, we dropped them into a number of handy buckets, watching the green algae spread out round them. I picked up one of the scrubbing brushes and set to with a will to restore the filters to their former pristine state.
    Katundi gave me a sly smile. “Now you have seen the house of Bwana Canning? It would be easy to live happily in such a house! ”
    It would indeed! I allowed myself to think about it for a moment before replying. “When the hotel is finished it will be even finer,” I said.
    Katundi was not bluffed. “It is not good for a man to live for ever without a woman,” he stated, apparently to himself.
    “There is always Janice,” I said dryly. “Memsahib Kemp.”
    Katundi shook his head, grinning. “Many white people come to Africa, but Africa only accepts some of them. You will see! Memsahib Kemp thinks always of her English home!” He looked at me curiously. “But you think only of Africa, mama. Why is that?”
    “I was born here,” I answered, laughing. “I have no other home to go to even if I wanted to.”
    He considered that. “The Kikuyu have a custom called kuheera. This would give you a home—”
    I stood up abruptly, throwing my scrubbing brush on to the ground. “I think we’ve finished, more or less,” I said with finality.
    Katundi turned away. “Ndiyo, memsahib,” he said sourly. There was no familiar mama now. I was afraid that I had hurt his feelings, but I didn’t know what to say to make things better. The trouble was that I had heard of the Kikuyu custom and I knew exactly what he meant. In the old days any single woman who was left on the shelf could look about her for a suitable married man and offer herself to him. If she were accepted, the man was obliged to make her his legal wife, giving her a respected position in his tribe.
    “I couldn’t!” I blurted out frankly.
    Katundi nodded sagely. “I understand,” he assured me solemnly. Which was a great deal more than I did! “It is shauri Mungu, the affair of God.”
    “Something like that,” I agreed. “I hardly know Bwana
    Canning at all!” I added fiercely.
    “No, but you have looked at him.”
    He had been squatting all this time while he worked, but he rose now and began to put the clean filters back into the river, magnificently unconcerned about anything else. Considering what a hare he had started within my own emotions, I was resentful that he should shrug off the whole conversation so easily. Did he think that I didn’t know that ‘looking’ was a typical African euphemism for ‘loving’?
    If it had been a less dreary morning I might have found something to laugh at in my own state of bereft annoyance, but my sense of humour had departed with the sun. The non-stop, dripping rain expressed my feelings all too well. What was needed, I thought, was action, and that meant work and lots of it. So, with a touch of grimness, I pulled my raincoat more closely about me and set off for the site and the damaged road to the top to see what I could do about it.
    The gangs of men were sheltering under the trees. Like cats, they treated rain with fastidious displeasure, shaking the water off their clothes only to watch it gathering again in unwelcome rivulets. The only happy creature was a weaver bird, chortling with song, as it carried out some rapid repairs to its perfectly woven pendulous nest that hung from a nearby acacia tree. The flash of yellow coming and going did much to restore my failing spirits. We needed the rain. Especially did the animals need the rain and a break in the drought that had gone on without a break for more than a year. From where I stood I could see the elephants below, crossing the river on their way to the plateau and the new feed that would now spring out of the