The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley

that’s all.’
    Tilly looked deeply hurt, and also riled by the injustice, as she felt it to be; for Robin would have been the first to have stuffed anything that came to hand into the commode. He respected most theories, a few great men of history, and Tilly, but not possessions, governments, nor the practical necessities of everyday life.
    ‘I wish I’d never come to this rotten country,’ she exclaimed when he had gone, with tears in her eyes. Sometimes she spoke aloud in my presence without exactly speaking to me; I was a kind of safety-valve, helpful to her feelings even in a passive role.
    ‘Everything is raw and crude and savage and I hate it!’ she cried. ‘The place is full of horrible diseases and crawling with insects, no one knows how to do anything properly, and there’s nobody to talk to for hundreds of miles!’
    Tilly had already been upset that morning by one of those gruesome little tragedies in which Africa abounds; tragedies that happen in a thousand places, and many times a day, that no one hears of, that do not matter, and yet for someone like Tilly,brought up to believe that life could be, and ought to be, full of joy and happiness for all creatures, capable of wounding the spirit and wringing the heart. It concerned the Speckled Sussex pullets she had brought from England, with a fine young cockerel, to start a new line of poultry. One of the pullets, now a hen, had been sitting and the chicks had just emerged: fluffy yellow balls, like animated chrysanthemum buds, that darted about, cheeping, full of life and charm. They had hatched the day before; in the night a column of
siafu
, those black, purposeful, implacable, and horribly sinister warrior ants, had marched through the nest. In the morning the yellow chicks were limp, bedraggled, soiled little corpses with their insides eaten out, lying in the nest. The hen was alive, and that was the worst part of it, for the ants had swarmed over her and eaten half her flesh away and her eyes, and she lay there twitching now and then, as if to demonstrate that unreasoning persistence of life that is the very core of cruelty. The hen was released from her pain and Tilly stood with a wisp of yellow fluff in her hand, herself white with misery, appalled by thoughts of the helpless chicks’ last moments of agony, and by her own failure to prevent the tragedy.
    ‘They were just hatched,’ she said. ‘Why did this have to happen? What
good
do
siafu
do?’
    ‘When they march, rain will come,’ Juma said, removing the corpses. He was quite unmoved;
siafu
were a natural hazard, and had done many worse things than that. They liked to swarm over living creatures and eat into their soft parts, especially the eyes.
    Later that morning, a woman brought along a baby that, several days before, had fallen into the fire. The burns had suppurated, and the pus been set upon by flies; the baby, like the hen, still persisted in living in spite of every discouragement, including pain that could never have relented, and that only death could relieve. The contents of the commode were quite inadequate to deal with this situation, as was Tilly’s knowledge of first-aid. It was remarkable how soon the news had spread that white folk possessed healing medicines, and how women who had refused even to approach us a few weeks ago were already anxious to hand over their children for treatment. Tilly was doubly horrified, by the baby’s ghastly injuries and by her own inability to justify its mother’s faith.
    ‘She must take it to hospital,’ Tilly said. Robin was out with the greased warriors, trying to persuade them to cut down bush.
    Everyone looked blank. Juma pointed out that the nearest hospital was in Nairobi which was two days’ journey, and that in two days the baby would certainly be dead.
    ‘Then we must take it in at once,’ Tilly insisted.
    ‘How, memsabu?’
    ‘In the mule-cart, of course.’
    ‘One of the mules has a bad stomach.’
    ‘It must go all