Green, incidentally, was what it was, and what it is. Ethiopia is not inevitably the cracked mud that is burned into the psyche of Britain and Europe by the bad times of famine that rocked the world. It is a vibrant country, mountainous and misty as much as sandy and endless. That first quintet boiled with nature because nature was what I knew. Years later, I took a trip to Moscow and was amazed, as we landed, to see that the city I had always imagined as a grey industrial grid was clutched in the arm of a great forest, and struck through with a wide river. It must be the same for other people flying into Addis Ababa and expecting some desert fort like Gordon’s Khartoum in the film with Charlton Heston: white walls and yellow sand, and, of course, the demented black men of the desert lurking all around.