Page 182:    The plane banks west, away from the Rift’s dried-out floor. Now they’re over land draining into Lake Victoria and feeding the Nile. The descent is towards a vast, verdant, fecund plain bound to the north by an escarpment and to the south, ignoring a political border, stretching without interruption towards the Serengeti’s immense and mysterious expanse.

p. 185:   Driving along trails or creeping off-track through the grass, they take in the Mara’s wealth: zebras, giraffes, buffaloes, gazelles, foxes, a distant rhino. They halt where a stream widens into pool. Soon enough, a few metres away, a hippo wells up from the deep. The beast, startled by the intrusion, opens jaws big enough to snap off a wheel, but Peter disdainfully stares down into the rosy throat. It’s a standoff and the animal sinks back down. Next they arrive in a vale, acacias everywhere, with the spaces between the trees, as far as the eye can see, filled with wildebeest, tens of thousands of them. Freakish creatures, wildebeests are, but as a herd they have the dignity of a slow-flowing river.

p. 186   The game run takes them to remote corners of the Mara. They see cheetahs (a female and three tumbling, clawing, biting cubs which prompt a moan from Rachel); they run into elephants flapping their ears; on a track they discover a hapless python, run-over, flattened in two places; and on trampled patches everywhere they watch the savannah’s hyperactive cleaning corps, clusters of vultures picking at bones to prepare them for years of bleaching.