Unit 9: Vocabulary from Readings 4

More lions, standing erect, grappling with strange, thin, elongated warriors who clutched spears and showed no fear in their slits of eyes.

Her eye followed the funny little valance of scrolled wood that outlined the chalet roof of the station; she thought of the lion and smiled.

There was a shout. The flag drooped out. Joints not yet coordinated, the segmented body of the train heaved and bumped back against itself.

Here, one-and-six baas!—As one automatically opens a hand to catch a thrown ball, a man fumbled wildly down his pocket, brought up the shilling and sixpence and threw them out; the old native, gasping, his skinny toes splaying the sand, flung the lion.

Her face was drawn up, wryly, like the face of a discomforted child.

If you wanted the thing, she said, her voice rising and breaking with the shrill impotence of anger, why didn’t you buy it in the first place?

A weariness, a tastelessness, the discovery of a void made her hands slacken their grip, atrophy emptily, as if the hour was not worth their grasp.

Later, when Teddy had his first haircut, Gideon the cook picked up the soft gold tufts from the ground, and held them reverently in his hand.

“Why did you frighten him?” asked Gideon, gravely reproachful.

He seemed to be putting a distance between himself and Teddy, not because of resentment, but in the way a person accepts something inevitable.

She had scarcely heard Gideon’s words; but when she saw that her remedies had no effect at all, and remembered how she had seen natives with no sight in their eyes, because of the spitting of a snake, she began to look for the return of her cook, remembering what she heard of the efficacy of native herbs.

And, as always, with a certain amount of exasperation, because while all of them knew that in the bush of Africa are waiting valuable drugs locked in bark, in simple-looking leaves, in roots, it was impossible to ever get the truth about them from the natives themselves.

He was perhaps a trifle perfunctory: It was not the first time he had come salting the tail of a fabulous bush secret.

He spoke incredulously, as if he could not believe his old friends could so betray him.

They were beginning to feel annoyed; and this feeling annulled the guilt that had been sprung into life by Gideon’s accusing manner.

The Farquars could hardly recognize their gentle, lovable old servant in this ignorant, perversely obstinate African, standing there in front of them with lowered eyes, his hands twitching his cook’s apron, repeating over and over whichever one of the stupid refusals that first entered his head.

Throwing the flowers casually into the back of his car, the eminent visitor departed on his way back to his laboratory.