![]() ![]() ![]() For as far as the eye could see, all around them, smooth bone-colored rocks caught the African sun, making the landscape resemble a vast graveyard where ungainly dinosaurs had met their end. Twice already, she had nodded off in the Land Rover, and that took some doing when you were driving over the corrugated volcanic ash that the Serengetiboasted in places. A two-hour train ride from Cambridge to London, two hours across London toHeathrow, two hours at Heathrow, waiting, thirteen hours in the air, including a two-hour stopover in Cairo, two hours at Nairobi International and more waiting, and then two hours in the smallest, noisiest, most bone-shaking single-engined contraption shehad ever seen, which had dropped her out of the sky at the red-clay Kihara airstrip not forty-five minutes ago. However primitive the beds might be, however much a relic of empire, however scratchy the horsehair mattresses, she'd be asleep in no time-just try stopping her. She'd been traveling without sleep now for more than twenty-three hours, since she had left Cambridge sometime yesterday, and she was anxious, longing, desperate, toreach Kihara camp. Natalie was weary-no, she was drained, exhausted, spent, and this delay was too much. "What's the matter, Mutevu? Why are you stopping? Watch out for that termite mound! Have we got a flat tire? What's wrong?" ![]() Natalie Nelson jolted her head on the side window and was shaken awake. ![]() The Kenya-Tanganyika border, September 1961 ![]()
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