We left the small kopje behind, and now a big one rose ahead. The hollow between the two was the place Mrs Boothby had said was visited by pigeons. We struck off the track to the foot of the big kopje, in silence. I remember us walking, silent, with the sun stinging our backs. I can see us, five small brightly-coloured young people, walking in the grassy vlei through reeling white butterflies under a splendid blue sky.

At the foot of the kopje stood a clump of large trees under which we arranged ourselves. Another clump stood about twenty yards away. A pigeon cooed somewhere from the leaves in this second clump. It stopped at the disturbance we made, decided we were harmless and cooed on. It was a soft, somnolent drugging sound, hypnotic, like the sound of cicadas, which - now that we were listening - we realized were shrilling everywhere about us. The noise of cicadas is like having malaria and being full of quinine, an insane incessant shrilling noise that seems to come out of the ear-drums. Soon one doesn’t hear it, as one ceases to hear the fevered shrilling of quinine in the blood.

‘Only one pigeon,’ said Paul. ‘Mrs Boothby has misled us.’

He rested his rifle barrel on a rock, sighted the bird, tried without the support of the rock, and just when we thought he would shoot, laid the rifle aside.

We prepared for a lazy interval. The shade was thick, the grass soft and springy and the sun climbing towards midday position. The kopje behind us towered up into the sky, dominating, but not oppressive. The kopjes in this part of the country are deceptive. Often quite high, they scatter and diminish on approach, because they consist of groups or piles of rounded granite boulders; so that standing at the base of a kopje one might very well see clear through a crevice or small ravine to the vlei on the other side, with great, toppling glistening boulders soaring up like a giant’s pile of pebbles. This kopje, as we knew, because we had explored it, was full of the earthworks and barricades built by the Mashona seventy, eighty years before as a defence against the raiding Matabele. It was also full of magnificent Bushmen paintings. At least, they had been magnificent until they had been defaced by guests from the hotel who had amused themselves throwing stones at them.

‘Imagine,’ said Paul. ‘Here we are, a group of Mashona, besieged. The Matabele approach, in all their horrid finery. We are outnumbered. Besides, we are not, so I am told, a warlike folk, only simple people dedicated to the arts of peace, and the Matabele always win. We know, we men, that we will die a painful death in a few moments. You lucky women, however, Anna and Maryrose, will merely be dragged off by new masters in the superior tribe of the altogether more warlike and virile Matabele.’