Binstead's Safari by Rachel Ingalls

hangover—nothing really painful and certainly not on the scale he had suffered in London, but something else bothered him, too. He sensed again the dread that had visited him two days before. So far there was merely his own faint misgiving rather than a definite presence; but, even so, it was disagreeable.
    He didn’t want to think about his brother, or about London, yet now he assumed that this physical oppression had to be connected with a period of his life that had already gone—it was his past catching up with him: all the regrets and anger and moments of bad conscience that he’d pushed away from him at the time in order to get to more unused and untainted life, more pleasures. He would never have associated the feeling with the future. He didn’t believe in things like that unless it could be proved that a wish or fear had warped someone’s attitude to such a degree that the distortion itself then helped to make an event happen.
    They travelled with Ian and his driver, Mahola. The heavy equipment—tents, cooking stores and so on—was in the trucks coming behind them. One other landrover accompanied the cookhouse staff, driven by a man named Mohammed. Pippa would start out later in the morning with Tom and Amos.
    It took only a little while to leave the town, leave people, at last to leave all noise. The only sounds proceeded from the engine as they moved forward, and the wheels on ground and undergrowth. Sometimes Mahola turned off the road to take a narrower track that went across the open plain. They saw the shapes of animals moving over the earth before the real daylight began. Figures drew away from them. Once Millie whispered, “Look,” and pushedStan’s arm. On her side, near the horizon, a black herd of elephant was outlined against the grey sky. He said, “Like the central hall in the Museum of Natural History.”
    “This came first.”
    When the sun started to show itself, it was as if during the night the continent had been under construction, and now the builders had finished putting it together and the curtain was going up. Millie felt at peace. Strength had come back into her, and just as suddenly as this: the sun rose and everything was different. It hadn’t ever been this way before, not during the years of her marriage, nor before that, when she’d lived at home with her family. Only now. Nothing threatened her. She had found her life.
    Stan slumped towards her until she felt the whole of his weight pressing down and she shifted so that he slid across her lap.
    “What a wonderful place,” she said, still in the lowered voice they had been using in the dark.
    “It’s not bad,” Ian said. “Not bad.”
    “It’s like the beginning of the world. It makes you wonder how anyone could bear to live anyplace else.”
    “Wait till we show you the mosquitoes. After we catch one, it takes an hour to get the hide off.”
    “That part must be a lot easier now, with pills and antibiotics.”
    “I should say so. Still won’t help you if you fall in the river.”
    “Oh, don’t. That was in Rupert’s book.”
    “Rupert?”
    “Dr Hatchard. He said last night I should call him by his first name.”
    “We’ve always called him Binkie. I suppose he thought it too—well, it’s a silly name. Can’t say to a lady:call me Binkie.”
    “Oh, I don’t know. A name’s a name.”
    “They wouldn’t agree with you out here. A name can make or break you.”
    “You mean a kind of description—Dewey looking like the man on top of the wedding cake?”
    “Sometimes it’s even simpler.”
    “Oh,” Millie said. “Colonel Headstrong.”
    “Precisely. Got it in one.”
    Soon after sunrise, the air began to feel warm. They drank coffee and tea and ate soda crackers. Millie caught sight of a strange object up in the air. It looked like a large peppermint. Ian told her, “That’s Archie Bell and what’s-his-name . His partner. They’re carrying out one of their surveys.”
    “For