220 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

poisoned flowers, the Thibetan guards, the old Arab
whom I think of now as someone like the Mandingo
chief at Koinya, were all in her service. I can still
recall the dull pain in my palms and my insteps
when I deliberately touched the flowers, for I was
always trying to escape her, her kindliness as well as
her destructiveness. Once I was incited to kill her:
I was given a book of ritual, bound in limp leather
like an Omar Khayyam at Christmas-time, and a
dagger. But she survived into many later dreams,
Any dream which opened with terror, with flight,
with falling, with unseen presences and opening
doors, might end with her cruel and reassuring
presence.

It was only many years later that Evil came into
my dreams: the man with gold teeth and rubber
surgical gloves; the old woman with ringworm; the
man with his throat cut dragging himself across the
carpet to the bed.

CHAPTER TWO

"CIVILISED MAN"
Full Moon

ALONG the northern border we had been walking
through the edge of the enormous bush; now we
moved steadily lower and deeper into its heart. The
deadness was sometimes broken by the squabble of
monkeys; a baboon once crossed the path, running
tjpnt like an old man with the tips of its fingers just