I saw a dead swollen buffalo once, floating in the Nile

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

Priscilla, as a child of single years, renders this wonderful jostling for position of prestige amongst her various cousins and extended family of colonial administrators, and the vying for post position of their respective countries of residence, Egypt and India.

Egypt was beautiful and wonderful, the most magical country in the world, if only it hadn't been for India. We spent every summer in England, in a world of cousins, but England was a transit camp, and Egypt was ours. All my Slessor cousins had been in India, at one time or another, because all their fathers were soldiers and it was where soldiers always went. Egypt was a trump card, incessantly over-trumped by India. India had more of everything, including that very prestigey thing - danger. It was larger, fiercer, and wilder; its people were more numerous and its diseases more lethal. India was a Raj and Egypt a Protectorate. India had the jungle; it had Mowgli, Shere Khan, and Bagheera, characters with whom poor Moses, wailing in his basket amongst the Nile rushes, could hardly be expected to compete.

'The Libyan desert', I informed my cousins, hopefully but inaccurately, 'is full of lions. How many lions has Uncle Will shot?'

'He shot a man-eating lion in the Sudan. He shot lots of crocodiles.'

It was no good. Their fathers had all shot tigers, panthers, wild buffaloes, elephants, and in extreme cases, Afghan tribesmen.

'I saw a dead swollen buffalo once, floating in the Nile.' But they had all, it appeared, seen dead swollen people floating in the Ganges.

'Where our friends the Dudgeons live, at Hanka, you can hear hyenas laughing in the night.'

'On our way up to Simla,' they countered, 'we camped in the jungle and you could hear the leopards roaring all night long. Quite close. And tiger.'

Their sophistication was electrifying. They even knew to say tiger and not tigers. Would one ever arrive at being so superbly scornful? Thus early do the Joneses raise their never to be drawn level with heads.