Going Solo Read Online Free PDF

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    That evening I was sitting on the veranda having a sundowner with Robert Sanford and his wife Mary, while two of the children were playing out on the grass in front of the house under the watchful eye of their black nurse. The heat of the day was becoming less intense as the sun went down, and the first whisky and soda was tasting good.
    ‘So what’s been going on in Dar?’ Robert Sanford asked me. ‘Anything exciting?’
    I told him about the black mamba and Salimu. When I had finished, Mary Sanford said, ‘That’s the one thing I’m always frightened of in this country, those beastly snakes.’
    ‘Damn lucky you happened to see it behind him,’ Robert Sanford said. ‘He was certain to have been killed.’
    ‘We had a spitting cobra near our back door not long ago,’ Mary Sanford said. ‘Robert shot it.’
    The Sanford house was on a hill outside the town. It was a white wooden two-storey building with a roof of green tiles. The eaves of the house projected far out beyond the walls to provide extra shade, and this gave the building a sort of Japanese pagoda appearance. The surrounding countryside was to me a very pleasant sight. It was a vast brown plain with many quite large knolls and hummocks dotted all over it, and although the plain itself was mostly burnt-up scrubland, the hills were covered with all sorts of huge jungle trees, and their dense foliage made little emerald-green dots all over the plain. On the burnt-up plain itself there grew nothing but those bare spiky thorn trees that you find all over East Africa, and there were about six huge vultures sitting quite motionless on every thorn tree in sight. The vultures were brown with curved orange beaks and orange feet, and they spent their whole lives sitting and watching and waiting for some animal to die so they could pick its bones.
    ‘Do you like this sort of life?’ I said to Robert Sanford.
    ‘I love the freedom,’ he said. ‘I administer about two thousand square miles of territory and I can go where I want and do more or less exactly as I please. That part of it is marvellous. But I do miss the company of other white men. There aren’t many even moderately intelligent Europeans in the town.’
    We sat there watching the sun go down behind the flat brown plain that was covered with thorn trees, and we could see the sinister vultures waiting like featheredundertakers for death to come along and give them something to work on.

    ‘Keep the children a bit closer to the house!’ Mary Sanford called out to the nurse. ‘Bring them closer, please!’
    Robert Sanford said, ‘My mother sent me out Beethoven’s Third Symphony from England last week. HMV, two records, four sides in all, Toscanini conducting. I’m using a thorn needle instead of a steel one so as not to wear out the grooves. It seems to work.’
    ‘Don’t you find the records warp a lot out here?’ I asked.
    ‘I keep them lying flat with a pile of books on top of them,’ he said. ‘What I’m terrified of is dropping one and breaking it.’
    The sun had gone down now and a lovely soft light was spreading over the landscape. I could see a group of zebra grazing among the thorn trees about half a mile away. Robert Sanford was also watching the zebras.
    ‘I keep wondering,’ he said, ‘if it wouldn’t be possible to catch a young zebra and break it in for riding, just like a horse. After all, they are only wild horses with stripes on.’
    ‘Has anyone ever tried?’ I asked.
    ‘Not that I know,’ he said. ‘Mary’s a good rider. What do you think, darling? How would you like to have a private zebra to ride on?’
    ‘It might be fun,’ she said. Even though she had a bit of a jaw, she was a handsome woman. I didn’t mind the jaw. The shape of it gave her the look of a fighter.
    ‘Perhaps we could cross one with a horse,’ Robert Sanford said, ‘and call it a zorse.’
    ‘Or a hebra,’ Mary Sanford said.
    ‘Right,’ her husband said, smiling.
    ‘Shall