IT was hot at Olifants – very hot.
I had anticipated that it might be too much for David and Margaret and booked them a rondavel with air conditioning. I had thought that I was sufficiently acclimatised by now, but I was wrong.
During the day there was a slight breeze, but as night descended the air became totally still.
It didn’t even have the strength to penetrate the mosquito gauze on the windows and opening the gauze let in more mosquitos than air.
If I was going to get eaten alive, inside or outside, I might as well sleep outside and get a bit of air. So I dragged my mattress out and spent my nights swatting mosquitoes and gazing at the stars.
Try as we might during the day, we could not find any cats. David and Margaret were going to have to go back to England without having seen even a lion in the wild.
“Never mind,” said David, “there’ll be plenty of time in the years to come for seeing cats.” Margaret gave him a funny look.
A year earlier, I had gone back to England for a short holiday and they had tried to convince me to stay. But I had fallen in love with Africa and was determined to return.
This had upset Margaret. Her only child would marry in a foreign land. She would never see her grandchildren.
“There’s an easy answer to that,” I had said. “Emigrate.”
It was, they had said, quite unthinkable – until they thought about it.
Then David admitted that he would rather be in a better climate and Margaret owned up to a dream of sitting under a palm tree with someone fanning her.
They weren’t going to find either on a wind-swept moor in Lancashire, so they had agreed to come and have a look.
The safari was going well and they were enjoying it, but there is a world of difference between enjoying an overseas holiday and digging up fifty-year roots in order to emigrate.
Until that remark about the cats of future years, I had not even dared to hope that I was winning.
But with the rugged beauty of the Blyde River Canyon to round it off, the trip was voted an unqualified success.
I had done what I set out to do and convinced David and Margaret that they were living in the wrong country.
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