ABSTRACT
Was it for that I had come to Africa? Here I was after two years in the desert and the bush, tied to my account books and inventories, fretting with debits and credits, losses and gains, like any grocer or dry goods' merchant on the public square. Adventure? Precious little of it. Thirst in the desert; a touch of fever during the season of rains; mild skirmishes with pilfering black men. But most of the time, in a sweltering comptoir at Djibouti, a baked mud house in Harrar; a hut on the mountainside, juggling with columns of figures, selling, buying, exchanging, loading pack mules for Dire Daoua and the coast for the problematic profit of some one-rarely for my own. The whole race of traders, we were like some noxious breed of insects burrowing in the rich African soil. Like beetles on a dungheap. That was what Africa meant to us--desert and plateau and mountain-a marvelous dungheap to plunder and abandon. . . .
