THE HOME FROM HOME 67

diseased villagers. I had not so much as heard a
mosquito and the daily five grains of quinine seemed
a waste of medicine.

But that was during the day; when it was dark,
sitting in the engineer's bare bungalow and drinking
warm beer, I wasn't so sure about the place. The man
looked sixty; one had to explain somehow the fifteen
years of white hair and lines he hadn't really lived.
He said again how happy he was; he hadn't been able
to settle in England, his wife was nervy, she had
never been out with him, West Africa wouldn't suit
her, she was afraid of moths, and as he spoke, the
moths flocked in through the paneless windows to
shrivel against the hurricane lamp, the cockchafers
and the beetles detonated against the walls and
ceiling and fell on our hair. He didn't mind insects
himself, he said, leaping from his chair, hitting at
the moths with his hand, squashing the beetles under-
foot. (He couldn't keep still for a moment.) The
only thing he feared, he said, was elephants. He had
been watching a shoot once beside his motor-cycle
when an elephant charged him; it was a hundred
yards away and he couldn't start his cycle. When it
was ten yards away he got his cycle started, and after
a quarter of a mile at twenty miles an hour he looked
back and saw that the elephant hadn't lost a yard.
He got up from his chair again and made for a
beetle, but it was too quick for him, driving tip
against the ceiling. He said he wasn't lonely, he
didn't know what nerves were—bringing his hand
against the wall—he always believed in having one
hobby; the last tour it had been the wireless, another
tour butterflies, this tour it was his car.