Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/399

 downpour, I could feel the whole thing bracing itself for the jump, with a creaking of timbers and a noisy whining of the strained wattling.

It was not much of a hut, it must be confessed, and I speedily got myself into much better quarters; but in those days I stood in no great need of a dwelling- place of my own. The district under my charge was extensive and it seemed to be cut off from the rest of the world almost as effectually as would have been the case if it had been located on the surface of some alien planet. I had been set apart from my fellow civil servants to learn all that was possible concerning it, to win the shy confidence of a people to whom white men were a new and suspect breed, to make myself a factor in their everyday life, and thereby to establish a personal influence among them, The which, in a new land, is the first, surest founda- tion of British rule. All this meant that it was my lot to rival the restlessness of the Wandering Jew; to sleep rarely more than a single night in the same casual resting-place; to live on what I could get, which often enough did not amount to much; and little by little so to familiarize the natives with my ubiquity that they should come to regard me and my visits as among the commonest incidents in the ex- perience of every village scattered up and down a wide countryside.

It would not be easy to conceive a life more delight- ful for a healthy youngster blessed with a keen in- terest in the much which he was learning and in the little that he was slowly and cautiously teaching.