Sometimes it is good to get away into this native landscape. I am weary of the Services - the officers on the terrace, the same groups. A contingent of nurses has produced a feeling of uneasiness. For the most part, well-scrubbed, solid, unattractive girls, but the effect is inevitable. Here sex is such an obvious problem.
Men shift and sidle in their chairs.
Landed at K beside a most unnatural jebel, giant bulges of rock in the shape of sugar loaves. The mess is an abandoned Italian colonial villa, the floors thick with dust and the scattered possessions of its present inhabitants. Impossible to make this place really habitable. There is hardly a stick of furniture, hardly a bench. I pitch my tent on the verandah, the bed that is already broken in two places, the chair that breaks in the course of the evening.