On Safari [antikvár]

Novice T IS late and the house is asleep. Tonight I had to drive the twelve and a half miles out to Nairobi airport to get the fmal film for our current television series on to the Friday night Comet, which stops here on its way from Johannesburg to London. In a few hours it will be unloaded at London Airport. For us another period of work will be over, and we will be free for a few weeks before our next expedition to the jungles of Suriname. Despite this I am restless to-night and although it is after midnight I cannot sleep. As I drove in from the road the moon was so bright I could see my house with its long white veranda outlined against the great plain beyond and the mauve of the Ngong hills heavy along the horizon. A jackal was barking in the distance. Frogs were echoing from the small stream beyond the track, and now as I sit here in the long room at the back of the house that I use as my office and film-cutting room, I can still hear them It is the sort of noise you never forget, and I fmd it one of the things I miss when I am away from Africa for long. For the last eight years we have lived here, Michaela and I, using this house as a base for our different journeys around the world. I, who for years have had a horror of houses, fmally possess a house of my own. I, who still believe the tent and the hotel to be two of man's most sacred inventions, designed this house myself and watched it being built. For eight years it has been our headquarters; the place where we have planned our films and television programmes, stocked our expeditions, kept our animals and returned to edit our films. It is an unusual place. Our garden consists of twenty-five acres 13