‘Yes, I know,’ said Paul. ‘I know it. The Gods favour me. Because I’ll admit to you, dear Jimmy, that I could not have brought myself to wring this pigeon’s neck.’

Jimmy turned away, suffering, to his observation of the ant-eaters’ pits. While his attention had been with Paul, a very tiny ant, as light as a bit of fluff, had fallen over the edge of a pit and was at this moment bent double in the jaws of the monster. This drama of death was on such a small scale that the pit, the ant-eater and the ant could have been accommodated comfortably on a small fingernail - Maryrose’s pink little fingernail for instance.

The tiny ant vanished under a film of white sand, and in a moment the jaws appeared, clean and ready for further use.

Paul ejected the case from his rifle and inserted a bullet with a sharp snap of the bolt. ‘We have two more to get before we satisfy Ma Boothby’s minimum needs,’ he remarked. But the trees were empty, standing full and silent in the hot sun, all their green boughs light and graceful, very slightly moving. The butterflies were now noticeably fewer; a few dozen only danced on in the sizzling heat. The heatwaves rose like oil off the grass, the sand patches, and were strong and thick over the rocks that protruded from the grass.

‘Nothing,’ said Paul. ‘Nothing happens. What tedium.’

Time passed. We smoked. We waited. Maryrose lay flat, eyes closed, delectable as honey. Willi read, doggedly improving himself. He was reading Stalin on the Colonial Question.

‘Here’s another ant,’ said Jimmy, excited. A larger ant, almost the size of the ant-eater, was hurrying in irregular dashes this way and that between grass-stems. It moved in the irregular apparently spasmodic way that a hunting dog does when scenting. It fell straight over the edge of the pit, and now we were in time to see the brown shining jaws reach up and snap the ant across the middle, almost breaking it in two. A struggle. White drifts of sand down the sides of the pit. Under the sand they fought. Then stillness.

‘There is something about this country,’ said Paul, ‘that will have marked me for life. When you think of the sheltered upbringing nice boys like Jimmy and I have had - our nice homes and public school and Oxford, can we be other than grateful for this education into the realities of nature red in beak and claw?’

‘I,m not grateful,’ said Jimmy. ‘I hate this country.’

‘I adore it. I owe it everything. Never again will I be able to mouth the liberal and high-minded platitudes of my democratic education. I know better now.’

Jimmy said: ‘I may know better, but I shall continue to mouth high-minded platitudes. The very moment I get back to England. It can’t be too soon for me. Our education has prepared us above all for the long littleness of life. What else has it prepared us for? Speaking for myself, I can’t wait for the long littleness to begin. When I get back - if I ever do get back that is, I shall …’