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away with it. He had submitted the work to his university press for publication. Fortunately, some of his colleagues had looked through the document and saved him. For a while, no one knew whether or not he was going to be fired. Then they found out that he had made a few alterations to the book and sold it for a stupendous sum to an independent film producer.
    “The last we heard of him, he had retired from his university duties and was negotiating for the foreign-language paperback sales.”
    Stan liked the story, but said that that was a scholarly fraud. What he was afraid of was what Jack had called a genuine fraud.
    “As I say, you must see for yourself. Go there. Look at everything. And be careful. Who have you with your team?”
    “Ian Foster.”
    “In that case, there will be no problem. Ian is one of the best. Nicholas too, but the older generation has known Ian longer. That’s important, especially here. We’ve had enormous changes in the past forty years. Upheavals, one could say. It makes a bond.”
    *
    Millie had taken one of the hotel tours through the game park. Stan saw her as she got out of the bus; she looked young and elegant next to several fat women and seemed to be on terms of the greatest friendship with everyone there, calling people by their names as she said goodbye. But when he asked her, “How was it?” she just said, “It was very nice. How was your morning?” He told her his morning had been fine. Naturally, he realized, her answer was simply the kind he himself usually gave.
    “Well,” he asked, “what did you see?”
    “Oh, everything.”
    “Such as what, Millie?”
    “Animals.”
    “Rabbits, cows?”
    “Elephants. Antelopes. Zebras. Rhinoceroses,” she said. “Lions.”
    “Rhinoceros.”
    “Rhinos. Nothing close-up. And giraffes.”
    “Which did you like best?” he said, and thought: What am I doing? This is like playtime with the three-year-olds. I’d like to hit her.
    “I don’t have favourites,” she told him. “I liked them all. That’s what was nice—there were so many. All different, all interesting, living together. Mohammed said they’re going to ban big game hunting soon.”
    Mohammed must have been the driver. Stan said, “They’d lose a lot of income if they did. It might be a disaster.”
    “They could get the same amount by just running photographic safaris and building a few more hotels where you can look out of your room and see the herds of wild animals grazing right there on the terrace. Don’t you think so?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe. It would be a blow to Ian and Nicholas.”
    “They’d just join the Department of Environment and Conservation. They’d be hired to cull the herds.”
    “Cull the herds? Where do you get all this high-flown technical jargon?”
    “I got some books out of the library before we left home.”
    “Well, I wouldn’t believe everything you read in travel books.”
    “Why not? They were all written by the people who live out here. At least, I think they were.”
    A battered landrover came to pick them up and take them out to the Fosters’ house. They were carried at a smart lick, though not at the breakneck speed they had feared at first sight of the machine. The driver’s name was Abdullah. He’d stuck a quotation from the Koran on the windshield and reinforced it with an evil-eye charm that hung from the mirror. Everyone in Africa, Stan thought,seemed to have a religion and to proclaim it without self-consciousness . Even the Europeans and their descendants probably went to church a lot. He was sure they did; it was that kind of place. And why, then, shouldn’t there be a resurgence of animal-spirit cults? It would tie in with the new nation’s desire to re-establish its cultural and racial heritage as it had been before other people had entered the country bringing different economies, tools, machines, different weapons and clothes, different gods.
    “You come from United States of America?”