Beau Geste

Mr. George Lawrence C.M.G. First Class District Officer of His Majesty''s Civil Service sat at the door of his tent and viewed the African desert scene with the eye of extreme disfavour. There was beauty neither in the landscape nor in the eye of the beholder. The landscape consisted of sand stone kerengia burr-grass tafasa underbrush yellow long-stalked with long thin bean-pods; the whole varied by clumps of the coarse and hideous tumpafia plant. The eye was jaundiced thanks to the heat and foul dust of Bornu to malaria dysentery inferior food poisonous water and rapid continuous marching in appalling heat. Weak and ill in body Lawrence was worried and anxious in mind the one reacting on the other. In the first place there was the old standing trouble about the Shuwa Patrol; in the second the truculent Chiboks were waxing insolent again and their young men were regarding not the words of their elders concerning Sir Garnet Wolseley and what happened long long ago after the battle of Chibok Hill. Thirdly the price of grain had risen to six shillings a saa and famine threatened; fourthly the Shehu and Shuwa sheiks were quarrelling again; and fifthly there was a very bad smallpox ju-ju abroad in the land (a secret society whose secret was to offer His Majesty''s liege subjects the choice between being infected with smallpox or paying heavy blackmail to the society). Lastly there was acrimonious correspondence with the All-Wise Ones (of the Secretariat in Aiki Square at Zungeru) who as usual knew better than the man on the spot and bade him do either the impossible or the disastrous. And across all the Harmattan was blowing hard that terrible wind that carries the Saharan dust a hundred miles to sea not so much as a sand-storm but as a mist or fog of dust as fine as flour filling the eyes the lungs the pores of the skin the nose and throat; getting into the locks of rifles the works of watches and cameras defiling water food and everything else; rendering life a burden and a curse. - Taken from Beau Geste written by Percival Christopher Wren