I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

He looked around the church, at the altar, the tabernacle, the brass candles, and the European saints, pale like albinos in the dark continent.

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

It felt odd and poetic and encouraging coming back after so many years, a shape imposing itself on life again after chaos.

Africa will always be the Africa of the Victorian atlas, the blank unexplored continent the shape of the human heart.