Free A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene

of them come back. I expect they had some kind of witchcraft going on. He started too late and he couldn’t catch up with them.’
    ‘I asked him what prayers. He said they prayed to Yezu Klisto and someone called Simon. Is that the same as Simon Peter?’
    ‘No, not quite the same. The fathers could tell you about Simon. He died in gaol nearly twenty years ago. They think he’ll rise again. It’s a strange Christianity we have here, but I wonder whether the Apostles would find it as difficult to understand as the collected works of Thomas Aquinas. If Peter could have understood those, it would have been a greater miracle than Pentecost, don’t you think? Even the Nicaean Creed – it has the flavour of higher mathematics to me.’
    ‘That word “Pendélé” runs in my head.’
    ‘We always connect hope with youth,’ Doctor Colin said, ‘but sometimes it can be one of the diseases of age. The cancerous growth you find unexpectedly in the dying after a deep operation. These people here are all dying – oh, I don’t mean of leprosy, I mean of us. And their last disease is hope.’
    ‘Then you’ll know where to look for me,’ Querry said, ‘if I should be missing.’ An unexpected sound made the doctor look up; Querry’s face was twisted into the rictus of a laugh. The doctor realized with astonishment that Querry had perpetrated a joke.

PART THREE
    CHAPTER 1
    I
    Rycker and his wife drove into town for cocktails with the Governor. In a village by the road stood a great wooden cage on stilts where once a year at a festival a man danced above the flames lit below: in the bush thirty kilometres before they had passed something sitting in a chair constructed out of a palm-nut and woven fibres into the rough and monstrous appearance of a human being. Inexplicable objects were the fingerprints of Africa. Naked women smeared white with grave-clay fled up the banks as the car passed, hiding their faces.
    Rycker said, ‘When Mme Guelle asks you what you will drink, say a glass of Perrier.’
    ‘Not an orange pressée ?’
    ‘Not unless you can see a jug of it on the sideboard. We mustn’t inconvenience her.’
    Marie Rycker took in the advice seriously and then turned her eyes from her husband and stared away at the dull forest wall. The only path that led inside was closed with fibre-mats for a ceremony no white man must see.
    ‘You heard what I said, darling?’
    ‘Yes. I will remember.’
    ‘And the canapés . Don’t eat too many of them like you did last time. We haven’t come to the Residence to take a meal. It creates a bad impression.’
    ‘I won’t touch a thing.’
    ‘That would be just as bad. It would look as though you had noticed they were stale. They usually are.’
    The little medal of St Christopher jingle-jangled like a fetish below the windscreen.
    ‘I am frightened,’ the girl said. ‘It is all so complicated and Mme Guelle does not like me.’
    ‘It isn’t that she doesn’t like you,’ Rycker explained kindly. ‘It is only that last time, you remember, you began to leave before the wife of the Commissioner. Of course, we are not bound by these absurd colonial rules, but we don’t want to seem pushing and it is generally understood that as leading commerçants we come after the Public Works. Watch for Mme Cassin to leave.’
    ‘I never remember any of their names.’
    ‘The very fat one. You can’t possibly miss her. By the way if Querry should be there don’t be shy of inviting him for the night. In a place like this one longs for intelligent conversation. For the sake of Querry I would even put up with that atheist Doctor Colin. We could make up another bed on the veranda.’
    But neither Querry nor Colin was there.
    ‘A Perrier if you are sure it’s no trouble,’ Marie Rycker said. Everybody had been driven in from the garden, for it was the hour when the D.D.T. truck cannoned a stinging hygienic fog over the town.
    Mme Guelle graciously brought the Perrier with her own