Now Mr. Mackay was standing looking as though he were trying to find
something that he had lost in the road. If they had been near enough
to Alec and his father they would have heard words like these:
"You see, Alec, this is the Zambesi River running down from the heart
of Africa into the Indian Ocean, and here running into the Zambesi
from the north is a tributary, the Shire. Livingstone going up that
river found wild savages who ..."
So the father was tracing in the dust of the road with the point
of his stick the course of the Zambesi which Livingstone had just
explored for the first time.
On these walks with his father Alec, with his blue eyes wide open,
used to listen to stories like the Yarn we have read of the marvellous
adventures of Livingstone.[50] Sometimes Mr. Mackay would stop and
draw triangles and circles with his stick. Then Alec would be learning
a problem in Euclid on this strange "blackboard" of the road. He
learned the Euclid--but he preferred the Zambesi and Livingstone!
One day Alec was off by himself trudging down the road with a fixed
purpose in his mind, a purpose that seemed to have nothing in the
world to do with either Africa or Euclid. He marched away from his
little village of Rhynie, where the burn runs around the foot of
the great granite mountain across the strath.
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