The Burning Shore

I will take a party over the rocks on foot, we must search the sea front, every foot of it, while you lead the convoy inland and find another way around. They had to slog four miles inland before they found a narrow precarious route over the rocks and could turn back towards the ocean.

When Garry saw Anna's distant figure striding manfully through the heavy beach sands far ahead, with her party straggling along behind her, he felt an unexpected relief, and realized how painfully he had missed her for even those few brief hours.

That evening as the two of them sat side by side, with their backs against the side of the T model Ford, eating bully beef and hard biscuit and washing it down with strong coffee heavily sweetened with condensed milk, Garry told her shyly: My wife's name was Anna also. She died a long time ago. Yes, Anna agreed, chewing steadily. I know."How do you know?

Garry was startled.

Michel told Centaine. The variation of Michael's name still disconcerted Garry.

I always forget that you know so much about Michael. He took a spoonful of bully, and stared out into the darkness. As usual, the men had bivouaced a short distance away to give them privacy, and their fire of driftwood cast a yellow nimbus and their voices were a murmur in the night.

On the other hand, I don't know anything about Centaine. Tell me more about her, please, Mevrou. This was a subject that never palled for either of them. She's a good girl, Anna always began with this statement, but spirited and headstrong. Did I ever tell you about the time-? Garry sat close to her with his head cocked towards her attentively, but this evening he wasn't really listening.

The light of the camp fire played on Anna's homely lined face, and he watched it with a feeling of comfort and familiarity. Women usually made Garry feel inadequate and afraid, and the more beautiful or sophisticated they were, the greater his fear of them. He had long ago come to terms with the fact that he was impotent, he had found that out on his honeymoon, and the mocking laughter of his bride still rang in his ears over thirty years later. He had never given another woman the opportunity to laugh at him again, his son had not truly been his son, his twin brother had done that work for him, and at well over fifty years of age Garry was still a virgin.

Occasionally, as now, when he thought about it, that fact made him feel mildly guilty.

With an effort he put the thought aside and tried to recapture the feeling of content and calm, but now he was aware of the smell of the body of the woman beside him. There had been no water to spare for bathing since they had left Swakopmund, and her odour was strong.

She smelled of earth and sweat and other secret feminine musks, and Garry leaned a little closer to her to savour it. The few other women he had known smelled of cologne and rosewater, insipid and artificial, but this one smelled like an animal, a strong warm, healthy animal.

He watched her with fascination, and still talking in her low thick voice she lifted her hand and pushed back a few strands of grey hair from her temple. There was a thick dark bush of curls in her armpit, still damp with the day's heat and staring at it Garry's arousal was sudden and savage as a heavy blow in his groin. It grew out of him like the branch of a tree, rigid and aching with sensations that he had never dreamed of, thick with yearning and loneliness, tense with a wanting that came from the very depths of his soul.

He stared at her, unable to move or speak, and when he did not reply to one of her questions, Anna glanced up from the fire and saw his face. Gently, almost tenderly, she reached out and touched his cheek.

I think, Mijnheer, it is time for my bed. I wish you good sleep and pleasant dreams. She stood up and moved heavily behind the tarpaulin that screened her sleeping place.

Garry lay on his own blankets, his hands clenched at his sides, and listened to the rustle of her clothing from behind the tarpaulin screen, and his body hurt like a fresh bruise. From behind the screen came a long-drawn-out rumble that startled him; for a moment he could not place it. Then he realized that Anna was snoring. It was the most reassuring sound he had ever heard, for it was impossible to be afraid of a woman who snored; he wanted to shout his joy into the desert night.

I'm in love, he exulted. For the first time in over thirty years, I'm in love. However, in the dawn all the transient courage he had gathered in the night had evaporated, only his love was still intact. Anna's eyes were swollen and red with sleep, her grey-streaked hair was powdered with crystals of sand that the night wind had blown over her, but Garry watched her with adoration until she ordered him brusquely, Eat quickly, we must go forward at first light. I have a feeling that today will be good. Eat up, Mijnheer! What a woman! Garry told himself admiringly. If only I could inspire a little of such devotion, such loyalty! Anna's premonition seemed at first to be well founded, for there were no more rocky barriers in their path, instead an open undulating plain ran right down to where the beach began, and the surface was firm gravel studded with knee-high salt bush. They could motor over it as though it were an open highway, forced only to swerve and weave in column to avoid the lumpy scrub, keeping just above the coppery beach so that they could spot any wreckage, or the signs left by a castaway on the soft sand.

Garry sat beside Anna on the back seat of the Ford and when they bumped over uneven ground, they were thrown together. Garry murmured an apology but left his good leg pressed against her thigh, and she made no effort to withdraw from his touch.

Suddenly, in the middle of an afternoon that trembled with heat, the watery curtains of mirage opened ahead of them for a few moments and they saw the beginning of the dunelands rise sheer out of the plain. The little convoy stopped before them, and everybody climbed out and stared up at them with awe and disbelief.

Mountains, Garry said softly, a mountain range of sand. Nobody ever warned us of this. There must be a way through!

Garry shook his head dubiously. They must be five hundred feet high."Come, Anna said firmly. We will go to the top."Good Lord! Garry exclaimed. The sand is so soft it's so high, it might be dangerous-'Let's go! The others will wait here. They toiled upwards with Anna leading, following the sloping razorback spine of one of the sand ridges. Far below them the cluster of vehicles was toylike, the waiting men tiny as ants. Beneath their feet the orange-coloured sand squeaked as their feet sank in to the ankles.

When they stepped too close to the edge of the razorback, the lip collapsed and an avalanche of sand went hissing down the slip-face.

This is dangerous! Garry murmured. If you went over the edge, you'd be smothered. Anna hoisted her thick calico skirts and tucked them into her bloomers, then she plodded on upwards, and Garry stared after her, his mouth dry and his heart banging against his ribs, driven with exertion and shock at the sight of her bared legs. They were massive and as solid as tree trunks, but the skin at the backs of her knees was creamy and velvety, dimpled like that of a little girl, the most exciting thing he had ever seen.

Incredibly, Garry felt his body react again, as though a giant's hand had seize is crotch, and his fatigue fell away. Sliding and stumbling in the soft footing, he scrambled upwards after her, and Anna's haunches, wide as those of a brood mare under the thick skirts, swayed and rolled at the level of his staring eyes.

He came out on the crest of the dune before he realized it, and Anna put out a hand to steady him.

My God, he whispered, it's a world of sand, an entire universe of sand. They stood upon the foothills of the great dunes and even Anna's faith wilted.

Nobody, nothing could get through them. Anna was still holding his arm, and now she shook him.

She is out there. I can almost hear her voice calling to me. We cannot fail her, we must get through to her. She can't last much longer. To attempt to go in on foot would be certain death. A man wouldn't last a day in there. We must find a way round. Anna shook herself like a huge St Bernard dog, throwing off her doubts and momentary weakness.

Come. She led him back from the crest. We must find the way round. The convoy with the Ford leading turned inland, skirting the edge of the high dunes while the day wasted away and the sun fell down the sky and bled to death upon their soaring crests. That night as they camped below them, the dunes were black and remote, implacable and hostile against the moonlit silver of the sky.

There is no way round. Garry stared into the fire, unable to meet Anna's eyes. They go on for ever. In the morning we will go back towards the coast, she told him placidly, and rose to go to her sleeping place, leaving him aching with his want of her.

The next day they retraced their tracks, riding in their own tyre-prints, and it was evening again before they had returned to the point where the dunes met the ocean.

There is no way, Garry repeated hopelessly, for the surf ran right up under the sand mountains and even Anna sagged miserably, staring silently into the flames of their camp fire.

If we wait here, she whispered huskily, perhaps Centaine is making her way down towards us. Surely she knows that her only hope is to head southwards. If we cannot go to her, we must wait for her to come to us. We are running out of water, Garry told her, quietly. We can't How long can we last? Three days, no more. Four days, Anna implored, and there was such a desolation in her voice and her expression that Garry acted without thought. He reached for her with both arms. He felt a kind of delicious terror as she came to meet him, and they clung to each other, she in despair and he in a fearful frenzy of lust. For a few moments Garry worried that the men at the other fire would see them, then he no longer cared.

Come. She raised him to his feet and led him behind the canvas screen. His hands were shaking so that he could not unfasten the buttons of his shirt. Anna chuckled fondly. Here, she undressed him, my silly baby. The desert wind was cool on his back and flanks, but he was burning internally with fires of long-suppressed passion. He was no longer ashamed of his hairy belly that bulged out in a little pot, nor of his thighs that were thin as those of a stork and too long for the rest of his body.

He scrambled on top of her with frantic haste, desperate to bury himself in her, to lose himself in that great white softness, to hide there from the world that had been so cruel to him for so long.

Then suddenly it happened again, and he felt the heat and strength drain from his groin, he felt himself wilt and shrivel just as he had on that other dreadful night over thirty years before. And he lay on the white mattress of her belly, cradled between her thick, powerful thighs, and he wished to die of shame and futility. He waited for her taunting laughter and her scorn. He knew it would destroy him utterly this time. He could not escape, for her powerful arms were wrapped around him and her thighs held his hips in a fleshy vice.

Mevrou, he blurted. I am sorry, I'm no good, I've never been any good. She chuckled again, and it was a fond and compassionate sound.

There's my baby, she whispered huskily in his ear. Let me help you a little. And he felt her hand go down, pressing between their naked bellies.

Where's my puppy? she said, and he felt her fingers fold about him and he panicked. He began to struggle to be free, but she held him easily and he could not escape her fingers. They were rough as sandpaper from hard manual work, but cunning and insistent, tugging and plucking at him, and her voice was purring and happy.

There's a big boy, then. What a big boy. He couldn't struggle any more, but every nerve and muscle in his body was tensed to the point of pain, and her fingers kneaded and coaxed and her voice became deeper, almost drowsy, without urgency, calming him so he felt his body unclenching.

Ah! she gloated. What's happening to our big puppy, then?

Suddenly there was a stiffening resistance to her touch, and she chuckled again, and he felt the great thighs that held him fall slowly apart. Gently, gently, she cautioned him, for he was beginning to struggle again, bucking against her. Like that! Yes, there, that's it. She was guiding him, trying to control him, but he was desperate with haste.

Suddenly there was a hot gust of her body smell in his nostrils, rich and strong, the marvelous aroma of her own arousal, and he felt the new surge of strength into the core of his being. He was a hero, an eagle, the very hammer of the gods. He was strong as a bull, long as a sword, hard as granite.

Oh yes! she gasped. There, like that! and resistance to him was not to be brooked, he drove forward and broke through and went sliding into the depths of her and the exquisite heat which was far beyond any place he had been in his entire existence. With increasing urgency and violence, she rose and fell beneath him as though he were a ship in an ocean gale and she made little crooning sounds, and urged him on in a ragged throaty voice, until the sky crashed down upon him and he was crushed between it and the earth.

He came back slowly from far away, and she was holding him and caressing him and talking to him like a child again. There, my baby. It's all right. It's all right now. And he knew that it was so. It was all right now. He had never felt so safe and secure. He had never known such deep pervading peace. He pressed his face between her breasts, and smothered himself in her abundant motherly flesh and wanted to rest there forever.

She stroked the sparse silky hairs back from off his ears, looking down on him fondly, and the bald pink patch at the crown of his scalp gleamed in the firelight and made her breasts ache with the need to comfort him. All her pent-up love and concern for the missing girl found new directions, for she was born to give succour and loyalty and duty to others. She began to rock him, cradling him and crooning to him.

Then, in the dawn, Garry found that there had been another miracle. For when he crept out of the camp and went down to the head of the beach, he found the way was open for them. Under the influence of a waxing moon, the ocean was building up to full spring tides, and the waters had drawn back, leaving a wide strip of hard smooth wet sand below the dunes.

Garry rushed back to the bivouac and hauled his senior NCO out of his blankets.

Get your men looking alive, Corporal! he shouted. I want the Ford refuelled, loaded with rations including water-cans for four people for three days, and I want it ready to leave in fifteen minutes, is that clear? Well then, get on with it, man, don't stand there gaping at me! He turned and ran back to meet Anna as she emerged from behind the tarpaulin. Mevrou, the tide! We can get through."I knew you would find a way, Mijnheer! Weill go in with the For, you and I and two men. We will drive hard until the tide turns, then push the Ford up above the high-water mark, and when it's out again we'll press on. Can you be ready to leave in ten minutes?

We have to take full advantage of the tide. He wheeled away from her. Come on, Corporal, get these men moving! And as he turned away, the Corporal rolled his eyes and grumbled just loudly enough for the others to hear him. What's come over our old sparrow, damned if all of a sudden he isn't acting like a turkey cock! They had two hours of hard driving, pushing the Ford to her top speed of forty miles an hour when the sand was firm and hard. When it turned soft, the three passengers, including Anna, leaped over the side and kept her rolling, throwing their full combined weight behind her, and then, as the sand firmed again, they scrambled on board, and hooting with excitement, sped northwards again.

At last the tide came surging back at them, and Garry picked out a gap in the dunes into which they backed the Ford, manhandling her through the dry, floury sand until she was well above the high-water mark.

They built a fire of driftwood, brewed coffee, and ate a picnic meal, and then settled down to wait for the next low tide to open the beach for them. The three men stretched out in the shade of the vehicle, but Anna left them and began picking her way along the high-water mark, pausing every once in a while to shade her eyes against the glare of sea and sand and peer restlessly into the north again.

Propped on one elbow, Garry watched her with such overwhelming affection and gratitude, that he found difficulty in breathing.

In the autumn of my life she has given me the youth that I never knew. She has brought me the love that passed me by, he thought, and when she reached the corner of the next sandy bay and disappeared behind the guardian dune, he could not bear to let her out of his sight.

He sprang up and hurried after her. As he reached the corner, he saw her a quarter of a mile ahead. She was stooped over something at the head of the beach, but now she straightened and saw him, and waved both hands over her head, shouting at him. The boom of the surf drowned out her voice, but her excitement and agitation was so obvious that he began to run.

Mijnheer, she ran to meet him, I have found, She could not finish, but seized his arm and dragged him after her.

Look! She fell on her knees next to the object. It was almost completely buried in the beach sand, and already the incoming tide was washing and swirling around it.

It's part of a boad Garry dropped beside her, and together they attacked the sand with their bare hands, frantic to expose the fragment of white-painted woodwork.

Clinker-built, Garry grunted. Looks like part of an Admiralty-type lifeboat. The next wave rushed up the beach and wetted them to the waist, but as it drew back it washed away the sand that they had loosened and exposed the name that was painted in black letters on the shattered hull.

Protea C- The rest o it was missing, the timers were raw and splintered where they had broken up in the hammering surf.

The Protea Castle, whispered Anna, and wiped the sand away from the lettering with her sodden skirts.

Proof! She turned her face to Garry, and tears were running freely down her red cheeks. Proof Mijnheer, it's proof that my darling has reached the shore and is safe. Even Garry, who was as eager as a bridegroom to please her, who wanted desperately to believe that he would have a grandson to replace Michael, even he gawked at her.

It's proof that she is alive, you do believe that now, don't you, Mijnheer? Mevrou, Garry fluttered his hands in an agony of embarrassment, there is an excellent chance, I do agree."She is alive.

I know it. How can you doubt it? Unless you believe- Her red face folded into a ferocious scowl, and Garry capitulated nervously.

I do, oh yes! I certainly believe it! No question she's alive, absolutely no question. Having carried the field, Anna faced the incoming tide, F and turned the full force of her displeasure upon the ocean. How long must we wait here, Mijnheer? Well, Mevrou, the tide flows for six hours and then ebbs for six, he explained apologetically. It will be another three hours before we can go on.

Every minute we waste now could make all the difference, she told him fiercely.

Well, I'm frightfully sorry, Mevrou. Humbly Garry took full responsibility for the rhythm of the universe upon himself, and Anna's expression softened. She glanced around her to make certain they were unobserved and then slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow.

Well, at least we know she is still alive. We will go forward again the very minute we are able. In the meantime, Mijnheer, we have three hours. She looked at him speculatively, and Garry's knees began to shake so that she could barely support him.

Neither of them spoke again while she led him back off the beach into a secluded gulley between two tall dunes.

As the tide turned and began its ebb, they drove the Ford down on to the sand. The rear wheels threw fish-tails of glistening seawater and wet sand high into the air behind them as they sped northwards.

Twice within five miles they found flotsam cast up on the beach, a canvas life-jacket and a broken oar. They had obviously been exposed to the elements for a considerable time, and although neither of these were marked with identifying numbers or lettering, they confirmed Anna's faith. She sat in the back seat of the Ford with a scarf knotted under her chin, holding her solar topee on her head, and every few minutes Garry darted a loving glance at her like an amorous fox terrier paying court to a bulldog.

It was the slack of low tide, and the Ford was travelling thirty miles per hour when it went into the quicksand. There was little warning. The beach appeared as hard and smooth as it had been for the last mile. There was only a slight change in its contour. It was dished and the surface trembled like a jelly as seawater welled up beneath the sand, but they had been moving too fast to notice the warning signs, and they went in at speed.

The front wheels dropped into the soft porridge, and stopped dead. It was like running into the side of a mountain. The driver was hurled against the steering column.

With a harsh crackle the spokes of the steering wheel collapsed, but the steel shaft tore through his sternum, pinning him like a mullet on a fish spear, and the jagged point ripped out of his back below his shoulder-blade.

Anna was thrown high out of the back seat, and landed in the soft mire of quicksand. Garry's forehead thudded into the dashboard, a flap of skin was torn from the bone and dangled over his eyebrow, while blood poured down his face. The corporal was caught in a tangle of loose equipment, and his arm broke with a crack like a dry stick.

Anna Was first to recover and she waded knee-deep through the soft sand, and with an arm around Garry's shoulder, helped him out of the front seat and dragged him to where the beach sand hardened.

Garry fell on his knees. I'm blind, he whispered.

Just a little blood! Anna wiped his face with her skirt.

She ripped a strip of calico from the hem of her skirt and hastily bound the flap of skin back in place, then left him and waded back to the Ford.

It was sinking slowly, tipping forward as it went down.

Already the engine bonnet was covered by soft yellow mush, and it was pouring gluttonously over the doors and filling the interior. She seized the driver by the shoulders and tried to drag him clear, but he was firmly impaled on the steering shaft, and bone grated on steel as she tugged at him. His head rolled lifelessly from side to side, and

she left him and turned to the corporal.

He was mumbling and twitching spasmodically as he regained consciousness. Anna pulled hiim free and dragged him back to the hard sand, grunting red-faced with the effort. He screamed weakly with pain and his left arm dangled and twisted as she lowered him to the sand.

Minheer, Anna shook Garry roughly, we must save the water before it sinks also. Garry staggered to his feet. His face was painted with his own blood, and his shirt was streaked and splattered, but the flow had quenched. He followed her back to the doomed Ford and between them they dragged the watercans to the beach.

There is nothing we can do for the driver, Anna grunted, as they watched the Ford and the dead man gradually settle below the treacherous surface. Within minutes there was no trace of them. She turned her attention to the corporal.

The bone is broken. His forearm was swelling alarmingly, and he was pale and haggard with agony. Help me! While Gary held him, Anna straightened the damaged limb and using a piece of driftwood as a splint, strapped it. Then she fashioned a sling from another strip of her skirt, and while she settled the arm into it, Garry said hoarsely, I calculate it's forty miles back, but he could not finish, for Anna glared at him. You are talking of turning back!

Mevrou' he made a little fluttery, conciliatory gesture, ,we have to turn back. Two gallons of water and an injured man, we will be extremely fortunate to save ourselves. She continued to glare at him for a few seconds longer, then gradually her shoulders slumped.

We are close to finding her, so near to Centaine. I can sense it -she may be around the next headland. How can we give her up? Anna whispered. It was the first time that he had ever seen her defeated, and he thought his heart might burst with love and pity.

We will never give her up! he declared. We will never give up the search, this is only a setback. We will go on until we find her. Promise me that, Mijnbeer. Anna looked up at him with pathetic eagerness. Swear to me that you will never give up, that you will never doubt that Centaine and her baby are alive. Swear to me here and now in the sight of God that you will never give up the search for your grandson. Give me your hand and swear to it! Kneeling together on the beach, with the incoming tide swirling around their knees, facing each other and holding hands, he made the oath.

Now we can go back, Anna climbed heavily to her feet. But we will return, and go on until we find her."Yes, Garry agreed. We will return.

Centaine must indeed have died a small death, because when she regained consciousness, she was aware of the morning light through her closed lids. The prospect of another day of torment and suffering made her clench her eyelids tightly and try to retreat again into black oblivion.

Then she became aware of a small sound like the morning breeze in a pile of dry twigs, or the noise of an insect moving with clicking armoured limbs over a rocky surface . The sound troubled her, until she made the enormous effort required to roll her head towards it and open her eyes.

A small humanoid gnome squatted ten feet from where she lay, and she knew that she must be hallucinating.

She blinked her eyes rapidly and the congealed mucus that gummed her lids smeared across her eyeballs and blurred her vision, but she could just make out a second small figure squatting behind the first. She rubbed her eyes and tried to sit up, and her movements provoked a fresh outburst of the strange soft crepitating and clicking sounds, but still it took her a few seconds to realize that the two little gnomes were talking to each other in suppressed excitement, and that they were real, not merely the figments of her weakness and illness.

The one nearest to Centaine was a woman, for a pair of floppy dugs hung from her chest to well below her belly-button. They looked like empty pig-skin tobacco pouches. She was an old woman, no, Centaine realized that old was not the word to describe her antiquity. She was as wrinkled as a sun-dried raisin. There was not an inch of her skin that did not hang in loose folds and tucks, that was not crinkled and riven. The wrinkles were not aligned in one direction only, but crossed each other in deep patterns like stars or puckered rosettes. Her dangling breasts were wrinkled, as was her fat little belly, and baggy wrinkled skin hung from her knees and elbows. In a dreamlike way, Centaine was utterly enchanted. She had never seen another human being that vaguely 0 resembled this one, not even in the travelling circus that had visited Mort Hormne every summer before the war, She struggled up on one elbow and stared at her.

The little old woman was an extraordinary colour, she seemed to glow like amber in the sunlight, and Centaine thought of the polished bowl of her father's meerschaum pipe which he had cured with such care. But this colour was even brighter than that, bright as a ripe apricot on the tree, and despite her weakness, a little smile flickered over Centaine's lips.

Instantly the old woman who had been studying Centaine with equal attention, smiled back. The network of wrinkles constricted about her eyes, reducing them to slanted Chinese slits. Yet there was such a merry sparkle in those black shiny pupils that Centaine wanted to reach out and embrace her, as she would have embraced Anna.

The old woman's teeth were worn down almost to the gums and were stained tobacco brown, but there were no gaps in them, and they appeared even and strong.

Who are you? Centaine whispered through her dark swollen dry lips, and the woman clicked and hissed softly back at her.

Under the loose wrinkled skin she had a small, finely shaped skull, and her face was sweetly heart-shaped. Her scalp was dotted with faded grey woolly hair that was twisted into small tight kernels, each the size of a green pea, and there was bare scalp between them. She had small pointed ears lying close to the skull like the pixies in Centaine's nursery books, but there were no lobes to the ears, and the effect of sparkling eyes and pricked ears was to give her an alert, quizzical expression.

Do you have water? Centaine whispered. Water.

Please. The old woman turned her head and spoke in that sibilant clicking tongue to the figure behind her. He was almost her twin, the same impossibly wrinkled, apricot, glowing skin, the same tight wisps of hair dotting the scalp, bright eyes and pointed lobeless ears, but he was male. This was more than evident, for the leather loincloth had pulled aside as he squatted and a penis out of all proportion to his size hung free, the uncircumcised tip brushing the sand. It had the peculiar arrogance and half erect tension of the member of a man in full prime. Centaine found herself staring at it, and swiftly averted her eyes.

Water, she repeated, and this time Centaine made the motion of drinking. Immediately a spirited discussion flickered back and forth between the two little old people.

O'wa, this child is dying from lack of water, the old Bushwornan told her husband of thirty years. She pronounced the first syllable of his name with the popping sound of a kiss. Kiss-wa. She is already dead, the Bushman replied quickly. it is too late, Hlani. His wife's name began with a sharp, explosive aspirate and ended with a soft click made with the tongue against the back of the top teeth, the sound that in Western speech usually signifies mild annoyance.

Water belongs to all, the living and the dying, that is the first law of the desert. You know it well, old grandfather. H'ani was being particularly persuasive, so she used the enormously respectful term old grandfather.

Water belongs to all the people, he agreed, nodding and blinking. But this one is not San, she is not a person.

She belongs to the others. With that short pronouncement O'wa had succinctly stated the Bushman's view of himself in relation to the world about him.

The Bushman was the first man. His tribal memories went back beyond the veils of the ages to the time when his ancestors had been alone in the land. From the far northern lakes to the dragon mountains in the south, their hunting grounds had encompassed the entire continent. They were the aboriginals. They were the men, the San.

The others were creatures apart. The first of these others had come down the corridors of migration from the north, huge black men driving their herds before them. Much later, the others with skins the colour of fish's belly that redden in the sun, and pale, blind-looking eyes had come out of the sea from the south. This female was one of those. They had grazed sheep and cattle on the ancient hunting grounds, and slaughtered the game which were the Bushman's kine.

With his own means of sustenance wiped out, the Bushman had looked upon the domesticated herds that had replaced wild game on the veld. He had no sense of property, no tradition of ownership nor of private possession.

He had taken of the herds of the others as he would have taken of wild game, and in so doing had given the owners deadly offence. Black and white, they had made war upon the Bushmen with pitiless ferocity, ferocity heightened by their dread of his tiny childlike arrows that were tipped with a venom that inflicted certain, excruciating death.

In impis armed with double-edged stabbing assegais, and in mounted commandos carrying firearms, they had hunted down the Bushmen as though they were noxious animals. They had shot them and stabbed them and sealed them in their caves and burned them alive, they bad poisoned and tortured them, sparing only the youngest children from the massacre. These they chained in bunches, for those that did not pine and die of broken hearts could be tamed. They made gentle, loyal and rather lovable little slaves.

The Bushmen bands that survived this deliberate genocide retreated into the bad and waterless lands where they alone, with their marvelous knowledge and understanding of the land and its creatures could survive.

She is one of the others, O'wa repeated, and she is already dead. The water is only sufficient for our journey. H'ani had not taken her eyes off Centaine's face, but she reproached herself silently. Old woman, it was not necessary to discuss the water. If you had given without question, then you would not have been forced to endure this male foolishness. Now she turned and smiled at her husband.

Wise old grandfather, look at the child's eyes, she wheedled. There is life there yet, and courage also. This one will not die until she empties her body of its last breath. Deliberately, H'ani unslung the rawhide carrying bag from her shoulder, and ignored the little hissing sound of disapproval that her husband made. in the desert the water belongs to everybody, the San and the others, there is no distinction, such as you have argued. From the bag she took out an ostrich egg, an almost perfect orb the colour of polished ivory. The shell had been lovingly engraved with a decorative circlet of bird and animal silhouettes and the end was stoppered with a wooden plug. The contents sloshed as H'ani weighed the egg in her cupped hands and Centaine whimpered like a puppy denied the teat.

You are a wilful old woman, said O'wa disgustedly. It was the strongest protest the Bushman tradition allowed him. He could not command her, he could not forbid her.

A Bushman could only advise another, he had no rights over his fellows; amongst them there were no chiefs nor captains, and all were equal, man and woman, old and young.

Carefully H'ani unplugged the egg and shuffled closer to Centaine. She put her arm round the back of Centaine's neck to steady her and lifted the egg to her lips. Centaine gulped greedily and choked, and water dribbled down her chin. This time H'ani and O'wa hissed with dismay, each drop was as precious as life blood. H'ani withdrew the egg, and Centaine sobbed and tried to reach for it.

You are impolite, H'ani admonished her. She lifted the egg to her own lips and filled her mouth until her cheeks bulged. Then she placed her hand under Cen tame's chin, bent forward and covered Centaine's mouth with her own lips. Carefully she injected a few drops into Centaine's mouth and waited while she swallowed before giving her more. When she had passed the last drop into Centaine's mouth, she sat back and watched her until she deemed that she was ready for more. Then she gave her a second mouthful, and later a third.

This female drinks like a cow elephant at a waterhole, O'wa said sourly. Already she has taken enough water to flood the dry riverbed of the Kuiseb. He was right, of course, H'ani conceded reluctantly.

The girl had already used up a full day's adult ration. She replugged the ostrich egg, and though Centaine pleaded and stretched out both hands appealingly, she replaced it firmly in the leather carrying satchel.

Just a little more, please, Centaine whispered, but the old woman ignored her and turned to her companion.

They argued, using their hands, graceful birdlike gestures, fluttering and flicking their fingers.

The old woman wore a headband of flat white beads round her neck and upper arms. Around her waist was a short leather skirt and over one shoulder a cape of spotted fur. Both garments were made from a single skin, unshaped and unstitched. The skirt was held in place by a rawhide girdle from which were suspended a collection of tiny gourds and antelope-horn containers, and she carried a long stave, the sharp end of which was weighted by a pierced stone.

Centame lay and watched her avidly. She recognized intuitively that her life was under discussion, and that the old woman was her advocate.

All that you say, revered old grandfather, is undoubtedly true. We are on a journey, and those who cannot keep up and endanger the rest, must be left. That is the tradition. Yet, if we should wait that long, H'ani pointed to a segment of the sun's transit across the sky which was approximately an hour! then this child might find enough strength and such a short wait would put us in no danger. O'wa kept making a deep glottal sound and flicking both hands from the wrist. It was an expressive gesture that alarmed Centaine.

Our journey is an arduous one, and we still have great distances to travel. The next water is many days; to loiter here is folly. O'wa wore a crown on his head, and despite her plight Centaine found herself intrigued by it, until suddenly she realized what it was. In a beaded rawhide headband the old man had placed fourteen tiny arrows. The arrows were made of river reeds, the flights were eagles feathers, and the heads, which were pointed sykwards, were carved from white bone. Each barb was discoloured by a dried paste, like freshly made toffee, and this it was that recalled to Centaine the description from Levaillant's book of African travels.

Poison! Centaine whispered. Poisoned arrows. She shuddered, and then remembered the hand-drawn illustration from the book. They are Bushmen. These are real live Bushmen! She managed to push herself upright, and both the little people looked back at her.

Already she is stronger, H'ani pointed out, but O'wa began to rise.

We are on a journey, the most important journey, and the days are wasting. Suddenly H'ani's expression altered. She was staring at Centaine's body. When Centaine sat up, the cotton blouse, already ragged, had caught and exposed one of her breasts. Seeing the old woman's interest, Centaine realized her nudity and hastily covered herself, but now the old woman hopped close to her and leaned over her.

impatiently she pushed Centaine's hands aside and with the surprisingly powerful fingers of her narrow, delicatelooking hands, she pressed and squeezed Centaine's breasts.

Centaine winced and protested and tried to pull away, but the old woman was as determined and authoritative as Anna had been. She opened the torn blouse and took one of Centaine's nipples between forefinger and thumb and milked it gently. A clear droplet appeared on the tip and H'ani hummed to herself and pushed Centaine backwards on to the sand. She put her hand up under the canvas skirt, and her little fingers prodded and probed skilfully into Centaine's lower belly.

At last Hlani sat back on her heels and grinned at her mate triumphantly.

Now you cannot leave her, she gloated. It is the strongest tradition of the people that you cannot desert a woman, any woman San or other, who carries new life within her. And O'wa made a weary gesture of capitulation and sank down to his haunches again. He affected an aloof air, sitting a little detached as his wife trotted down to the edge of the sea with the weighted digging stick in her hands. She inspected the wet sand carefully as the wavelets swirled around her ankles and then she thrust the point of the stick into the sand and walked backwards, ploughing a shallow furrow. The point of the stick struck a solid object beneath the sand and H'ani darted forward, digging with her fingers, picked out something and dropped it into her carrying bag. Then she repeated the process.

Within a short time she returned to where Centaine lay and emptied a pile of shellfish from her bag on to the sand. They were double-shelled sand clams, Centaine saw at once, and she was bitterly angry at her own stupidity.

For days she had starved and thirsted as she had hobbled over a beach alive with these luscious shellfish.

The old woman used a bone cutting tool to open one of the clams, holding it carefully so as not to spill the juices from the mother-of-pearl-lined shell, and she passed it to Centaine. Ecstatically, Centaine slurped the juices from the half-shell and then dug out the meat with her grubby fingers and popped it into her mouth.

Bon! she told H'ani, her whole face screwed up with exquisite pleasure as she chewed, Trs bon! H'ani grinned and bobbed her head, working on the next clam with the bone knife. it was an inefficient tool that made the opening of each shell a laborious business and broke chips of the shell on to the body of the clam that gritted under Centaine's teeth. After three more clams, Centaine groped for her clasp knife and opened the blade.

O'wa had been demonstrating his disapproval by squatting a little apart and staring out to sea, but at the click of the knife blade his eyes swivelled to Centaine and then widened with intense interest.

The San were men of the Stone Age, but although the quarrying and smelting of working iron were beyond their culture, O'wa had seen iron implements before. He had seen those picked up by his people from the battlefields of the black giants, others that had been taken secretly from camps and bivouacs of strangers and travellers, and once he had known a man of the San who had possessed an implement as this girl now held in her hand.

The man's name had been Xja, the clicking sound at the back of his teeth that a horseman makes to urge on his steed, and Xja had taken O'was eldest sister to wife thirty-five years before. As a young man, Xja had found the skeleton of a white man at a dry water-hole at the edge of the Kalahari. The body of the old elephant hunter had lain beside the skeleton of his horse, with his long four-to-the-pound elephant gun at his side.

Xja had not touched the gun, because he knew from legend and bitter experience that thunder lived in this strange magical stick, but gingerly he had examined the contents of the rotting leather saddle-bags and discovered such treasures as Bushmen before him had only dreamed of. Firstly there was a leather pouch of tobacco, a month's supply of it, and Xja had tucked a pinch under his lip and happily examined the rest of the hoard. Quickly he discarded a book and a roll of cardboard, which contained small balls of heavy grey metal, they were ugly and of no possible use. Then he discovered a beautiful flask of yellow metal on a leather strap. The flask was filled with useless grey powder which he spilled into the sand, but the flask itself was so marvellously shiny that he knew no woman would be able to resist it. Xja, who was not a mighty hunter nor a great dancer or singer, had long pined after the sister of O'wa who had a laugh that sounded like running water. He had despaired of ever catching her attention, had not even dared to shoot a miniature feather-tipped arrow from his ceremonial love bow in her direction, but with his shiny flask in his hand he knew that at last she would be his woman.

Then Xja found the knife, and he knew that with it he would win the respect of the men of his tribe for which he longed almost as much as he longed for the lovely sister of O'wa. It was almost thirty years since O'wa had last seen Xja and his sister. They had disappeared into the lonely wastes of the dry land to the east, driven from the clan by the strange emotions of envy and hatred that the knife had evoked in the other men of the tribe.

Now O'wa stared at a similar knife in this female's hands as she split open the clam shells and wolfed raw the sweet yellow meat, and drank the running juices.

To this moment he had been merely repelled by the female's huge ungainly body, bigger than any man of the San, and her enormous hands and feet, by her thick wild bush of hair and her skin which the sun had parboiled, but when he looked at the knife, all the confusing feelings of long ago flooded back and he knew he would lie awake at night thinking about the knife.

O'wa stood up. Enough, he said to H'ani. It is time to go on. A little longer. Whether carrying a child or not, no one can endanger the lives of all. We must go on, and again H'ani knew he was right. They had already waited much longer than was wise. She stood up with him and adjusted the carrying bag on her shoulder.

She saw panic flare in Centaine's eyes as she realized their intention. Wait for me! Attendez! Centaine scrambled to her feet, terrifed at the taught of being deserted.

Now O'wa shifted the small bow into his left hand, tucked his dangling penis back into the leather loincloth and tightened the waistband. Then, without glancing back at the women, he started off along the edge of the beach.

H'ani fell in behind him. The two of them moved with a swaying jog trot and for the first time Centaine noticed their pronounced buttocks, enormous protuberances that jutted out so sharply behind that Centaine was sure that she could sit astride H'ani's backside and ride on it as though on a pony's back, and the idea made her want to giggle. H'ani glanced back at her and flashed an encouraging smile, and then looked ahead. Her backside bobbed and joggled and her ancient breasts flapped against her belly.

Centaine took a step after them and then came up short, stricken by dismay.

Wrong way! she cried. You're going the wrong way! The two little pygmies we-re heading back into the north, away from Cape Town and Walvis Bay and Uideritzbucht and all of civilization.

You can't- Centaine was frantic, the loneliness of the desert Jay in wait for her and like a ravening beast it would consume her if she were left alone again. But if she followed the two little people she was turning her back on her own kind and the succour that they might hold out for her.

She took a few uncertain paces after Ram. Please don't go! The old woman understood the appeal, but she knew there was only one way to get the child moving. She did not look back.

Please! Please! That rhythmic jog trot carried the two little people away disturbingly quickly.

For a few moments longer Centaine hesitated, turning to look away southwards, torn and desperate. H'ani was almost quarter of a mile down the beach and showing no sign of slackening.

Wait for me! Centaine cried and snatched up her driftwood club. She tried to run but after a hundred paces settled down to a short, hampered but determined walk.

By noon the two figures she followed had dwindled to specks and finally disappeared into the sea fret far ahead up the beach. However, their footprints were left upon the brassy sands, tiny childlike footprints, and Centaine fastened her whole attention upon them and never really knew how or where she found the strength to stay on her feet and live out that day.

Then in the evening when her resolve was almost gone, she lifted her eyes from the footprints and far ahead she saw a drift of pale blue smoke wafting out to sea. It emanated from an outcrop of yellow sandstone boulders above the high-water mark and it took the last of her strength to carry her to the encampment of the San.

She sank down, utterly exhausted, beside the fire of driftwood, and H'ani came to her, chattering and clucking, and like a bird with its chick fed her water from mouth to mouth. The water was warm and slimy with the old woman's saliva, but Centaine had never tasted anything so delicious. As before, there was not enough of it and the old woman stoppered the ostrich-egg shell before Centaine's thirst was nearly slaked.

Centaine tore her gaze away from the leather carrying bag full of eggs and looked for the old man.

She saw him at last. Only his head was visible as he ferreted amongst the kelp beds out in the green waters.

He had stripped naked, except for the beads aound his neck and waist, and had armed himself with H'ani's pointed digging stick. Centaine watched him stiffen to point like a gundog and then launch a cunning thrust with the stick, and the water exploded as O'wa wrestled with some large and active prey. H'ani clapped her hands and ululated encouragement, and finally the old man dragged a kicking struggling creature on to the beach.

Despite her weariness and weakness, Centaine rose up on her knees and exclaimed with amazement. She knew what the quarry was, indeed lobster was one of her favourite dishes, but still she thought that her senses must have at last deserted her for this creature was too big for O'wa to lift. its great armoured tail dragged in the sand, clattering as it flapped, and its long thick whiskers reached above O'wa's head as he gripped one in each of his little fists. H'ani rushed down to the water's edge armed with a rock the size of her own head and between them they beat the huge crustacean to death.

Before it was dark O'wa killed two more, each almost as large as the first, and then he and H'ani scraped a shallow hole in the sand and lined it with kelp leaves.

While they prepared the cooking hole, Centaine examined the three huge crustaceans. She saw immediately that they were not armed with claws like a lobster, and so must be the same species as the Mediterranean langouste that she had eaten at her uncle's table in the chAteau at Lyon. But these were a mammoth variety. Their whiskers were as long as Centaine's arm and at the root were as thick as her thumb. They were so old that barnacles and seaweed adhered to their spiny carapaces as if they were rocks.

O'wa and H'ani buried them in a kelp-lined pit under a thin layer of sand and then heaped a bonfire of driftwood over them. The flames lit their glowing apricot-coloured bodies as they chatted exuberantly. When their work was finished O'wa sprang up and began a shuffling little dance, singing in a cracked falsetto voice as he circled the fire.

H'ani clapped a rhythm for him and hummed in her throat, swaying where she sat, and O'wa danced on and on while Centaine lay exhausted and marvelled at the little man's energy, and wondered vaguely at the purpose of the dance and the meaning of the words of the song.

I greet you, Spirit of red spider from the sea, And I dedicate this dance to you, sang O'wa, jerking his legs so that his naked buttocks that protruded from under the leather loincloth bounced like jellies.

I offer you my dance and my respect, for you have died that we may live-And H'ani punctuated the song with shrill piping cries.

O'wa, the skilled and cunning hunter, had never killed without giving thanks to the game that had fallen to his arrows Or his snares, and no creature was too small and mean to be so honoured. For being himself a small creature, he recognized the excellence of many small things, and he knew that the scaly anteater, the pangolin, was to be honoured even more than the lion, and the praying mantis, an insect, was more worthy than the elephant or the gemsbok, for in each of them reposed a special part of the godhead of nature which he worshipped.

He saw himself as no more worthy than any other of these creatures, with no rights over them other than those dictated by the survival of himself and his clan, and so he thanked the spirits of his quarry for giving him life, and when the dance ended he had beaten a pathway in the sand around the fire.

He and H'ani scraped away the ashes and sand and exposed the carcasses of the giant crayfish now turned deep vermilion in colour and steaming on the bed of kelp.

They burned their fingers and squealed with laughter as they broke open the scaly red tails and dug out the rich white meat.

H'ani beckoned to Centaine and she squatted beside them. The legs of the crayfish contained sticks of flesh the size of her finger, the thorax was filled with the yellow livers which had been broken down in the cooking to a custard. The San used this as sauce for the flesh.

Centaine could not remember ever having so much enjoyed eating. She used the knife to slice bite-sized chunks off the tail of the crayfish. H'ani smiled at her in the firelight, her cheeks bulging with food, and she said, Nam! and then again, Nam! Centaine listened carefully, then repeated it, with the same inflexion as the old woman had used. Nam! And H'ani squealed gleefully. Did you hear, O'wa, the child said "Good!"

O'wa grunted and watched the knife in the female's hand. He found he could not take his eyes off it. The blade sliced through the meat so cleanly that it left a sheen on it. How sharp it must be, thought O'wa, and the sharpness of the blade spoiled his appetite.

With her stomach so full that it was almost painful, Centaine lay down beside the fire, and H'ani came to her and scraped out a hollow for her hip in the sand beneath her. It was immediately more comfortable and she settled down again, but H'ani was trying to show her something else.

You must not lay your head on the ground, Nam Child, she explained. You must keep it up, like this. Ham propped herself on one elbow and then laid her head on her own shoulder. It looked awkward and uncomfortable, and Centaine smiled her thanks but lay flat.

Leave her, grunted O'wa. When a scorpion crawls into her ear during the night, she will understand. She has learned enough for one day, H'ani agreed. Did you hear her say "Nam"? That is her first word and that is the name I will give her, "Nam", she repeated it, Nam Child. O'wa grunted and went off into the darkness to relieve himself. He understood his wife's unnatural interest in the stranger and the child she carried in her womb, but there was a fearful journey ahead and the woman would be a dangerous nuisance. Then, of course, there was the knife, thinking about the knife made him angry.

Centaine awoke screaming. It had been a terrible dream, confused but deeply distressing, she had seen Michael again, not in the flaming body of the aeroplane, but riding Nuage. Michael's body was still blackened by the flames and his hair was burning like a torch, and beneath him Nuage was torn and mutilated by the shells and his blood was bright on the snowy hide and his entrails dangled from the torn belly as he ran.

There is my star, Centaine, Michael pointed ahead with a hand like a black claw. Why don't you follow it? I cannot, Michael, Centaine cried, oh, I cannot. And Michael galloped away across the dunes into the south without looking back and Centaine screamed after him, Wait, Michel, wait for me! She was still screaming when gentle hands shook her awake.

Peace, Nam Child, H'ani whispered to her. Your head is full of the sleep demons, but see, they are gone now. Centaine was still sobbing and shivering and the old woman lay down beside her and spread her fur cape over them both and held her and stroked her hair. After a while Centaine quietened down. The old woman's body smelled of woodsmoke and animal fat and wild herbs, but it was not offensive and her warmth comforted Centaine, and after a while she slept again, this time without the nightmares.

H'ani did not sleep. Old people do not need the sleep that the young do. But she felt at peace. The bodily contact with another human being was something she had missed all these long months. She had known from childhood how important it was. The infant San was strapped close to its mother's body, and lived the rest of its life in intimate physical contact with the rest of the clan. There was a saying of the clan, The zebra on his own falls easy prey to the hunting lion, and the clan was a close-knit entity.

Thinking thus, the old woman became sad again, and the loss of her people became a great stone in her chest too heavy to carry. There had been nineteen of them in the clan of O'wa and H'ani, their three sons and their wives and the eleven children of their sons. The youngest of H'ani's grandchildren was still unweaned and the eldest, a girl whom she loved most dearly, had just menstruated for the first time when the sickness came on the clan.

It had been a plague beyond anything in the annals of the clan and of the San; something so swift and savage that H'ani still could not comprehend it or come to terms with it. It had started first as a sore throat which changed to raging fever, a skin so hot that it was almost searing to the touch and a thirst beyond anything the Kalahari itself, which the San called the Great Dry, could generate.

At this stage the little ones had died, just a day or two after the first symptoms, and the elders had been so debilitated by the sickness that they did not have the strength to bury them and their tiny bodies decomposed swiftly in the heat.

Then the fever passed and they believed that they had been spared. They buried the babies, but they were too weak even to dance for the spirits of the infants or to sing them away on their journey into the other world.

They had not been spared, however, for the sickness had only changed its form, and now there came a new fever, but at the same time their lungs filled with water and they rattled and choked as they died.

They all died, all of them except O'wa and H'ani, but even they were so close to death that it was many days and many nights before they were strong enough to appreciate the full extent of the disaster that had overtaken them.

When the two old people were sufficiently recovered, they danced for their doomed clan, and H'ani cried for her babies that she would never again carry on her hip nor enchant with her fairy-tales.

Then they had discussed the cause and the meaning of the tragedy, they discussed it endlessly around their campfire in the night, grieving still to the depths of their beings, until one night O'wa had said, When we are strong enough for the journey, and you know, H'ani, what a fearsome journey it is, then we must go back to the Place of All Life, for only there will we find the meaning of this thing, and learn how we can make recompense to the angry spirits that have smitten us so. H'ani became once more aware of the young and fruitful body in her arms and her sadness lifted a little and she felt the resurgence of the mother instinct in her milkless and withered bosom, which had been snuffed out by the great sickness.

It may be, she thought, that already the spirits are mollified because we have begun the pilgrimage, and that they will grant this old woman the boon of hearing once more the birth cry of a new infant before she dies. In the dawn H'ani unstoppered one of the little buckhoms that hung from her girdle and with an aromatic paste dressed the sun blisters on Centaine's cheeks and nose and lips, and the grazes and bruises on her legs and arms, chattering away to her as she worked. Then she allowed Centaine a carefully measured ration of water.

Centaine was still savouring it, holding it in her mouth as though it were a rare Bordeaux, when without further ceremony the two San stood up, turned their faces northwards and set off along the beach in that rhythmic jogtrot.

Centaine sprang up in consternation and without wasting breath on entreaties, she snatched up her club, adjusted the canvas hood over her head and started after them.

Within the first mile she realized how the food and rest had strengthened her. She was at first able to hold the pair of tiny figures in sight. She saw H'ani prod the sand with her digging stick, scoop up a sand clam almost without breaking stride and hand it to O'wa, then pluck another for herself and eat it on the run.

Centaine sharpened one end of the club to a point and imitated her, at first unsuccessfully, until she realized that the clams were in pockets in the beach, and H'ani had some means of locating them. It was useless to scrape at random. From then on she dug only where H'ani had marked the sand and drank the juice from the shells thankfully as she trotted along.

Despite her best efforts, Centaine's pace soon flagged and gradually the two San drew away from her and once again disappeared from her view. By midday Centaine was down to a dragging walk and knew that she had to rest. As she accepted it, she lifted her eyes and recognized far ahead of her the headland of the seal colony.

it was almost as though Hand had divined the exact limit of her endurance, for she and O'wa were waiting for her in the rock shelter, and she smiled and chittered with pleasure as Centaine dragged herself up the slope into the cave and fell exhausted on to the floor beside the fire.

H'ani gave her a ration of water, and while she did so, there was another lively argument between the old people which Centaine watched with interest, noticing that every time H'ani pointed at her she used the word nam.

The gestures that the old people made were so expressive that Centaine was sure she understood the old woman wanted to stay for her sake, while O'wa wanted to go on.

Every time H'ani pointed at her mate, she made that kissing pop of her lips. Suddenly Centaine interrupted the discussion by also pointing at the little Bushman and saying, O'wa! They both stared at her in stupefied amazement, and then with delighted squeals of glee acknowledged her accomplishment.

O'wa! H'ani prodded her husband in the ribs, and hooted.

O'wa! The old man slapped his own chest, and bobbed up and down with gratification.

For the moment the argument was forgotten, as Centaine had intended, and as soon as the first excitement had passed, she pointed at the old woman, who was quick to understand her query. H'ani? she enunciated clearly.

On the third attempt, Centaine sounded the final click to Ham's satisfaction and high delight.

Centaine. She touched her own chest, but this precipitated shrill denials and a fluttering of hands.

Nam Child! H'ani slapped her gently on the shoulder, and Centaine resigned herself to another christening. Nam Child! she agreed.

So, revered old grandfather, H'ani rounded on her husband, Nam Child may be ugly, but she learns fast and she is with child. We will rest here and go on tomorrow.

The matter is at an end! And grumbling under his breath O'wa shuffled out of the shelter, but when he came back at dusk, he carried-the fresh carcass of a half-grown seal over one shoulder, and Centaine felt so rested that she joined in the ceremony of thanksgiving, clapping with H'ani and imitating her piping cries while O'wa danced around them and the seal meat grilled over the embers.

The ointment which H'ani had used on her injuries brought rapid results. The raw burns and blisters on her face dried up, and her skin with its Celtic pigmentation darkened to the colour of teak as it became conditioned to the sun, though she used her fingers to brush out her thick dark hair to shade as much of her face as possible.

Each day she grew stronger as her body responded to hard work and the protein-rich diet of seafood. Soon she could really reach out with her long legs and match the pace that O'wa set, and there was no more lagging behind, or argument about early halts. For Centaine it became a matter of pride to keep up with the old couple from dawn until dusk.

I'll show you, you old devil, she muttered to herself, fully aware of the strange antagonism which O'wa felt towards her but believing that it was her weakness and helplessness and her drag on the party that was the cause.

one day as they were about to begin, and despite the old woman's protests, she took half the water-filled ostrich eggs from H'ani's load and slung them in her canvas shawl. Once H'ani realized her intention, she acquiesced willingly and ribbed the old man mercilessly as they set out on the day's trek.

Nam Child carries her share, just like a woman of the San, she said, and when she had exhausted her gibes she turned all her attention to Centaine and began her instruction in earnest, pointing with her digging stick and not satisfied until Centaine had the word right or showed that she understood the lesson.

At first Centaine was merely humouring the old woman, but soon she was delighting in each fresh discovery and the day's journey seemed lighter and swifter as her body strengthened and her understanding grew.

What she had at first believed was a barren wasteland was instead a world teeming with strange and wonderfully adapted life.

The kelp beds and underwater reefs were treasure houses of crustaceans and shellfish and seaworms, and occasionally the low tide left a shoal of fish trapped in a shallow rock pool, They were deep, fullbodied fish with gunmetal gleaming scales and a slightly greenish tinge to the flesh, but when split and grilled on the coals, were better than turbot.

Once they came across a nesting colony of jackass penguins. The penguins were on a rocky island, connected to the mainland by a reef across which they waded at low tide, although Centaine had shark horrors all the way over. The thousands of black and white jackass penguins nested on the bare ground, and hissed and brayed with outrage as the Bushmen harvested the big green eggs and filled the canvas carrying bag with them. Roasted in the sand under the fire they were delicious, with transparent, jelly-like whites and bright yellow yolks, but so rich that they could only be eaten one at a time and the supply lasted many days.

Even the shifting dunes with precipitous slip-faces of loosely running sand were the homes of sand-burrowing lizards and the venomous side-winding adders that preyed upon them. They clubbed both lizards and adders and cooked them in their scaly skins, and after Centaine had mastered her initial aversion, she found that they tasted like chicken.

As they trekked northwards, the dunes became intermittent, no longer presenting an unbroken rampart, and between them were valleys whose bottoms were of firm earth, albeit as bare and as blasted as the dunes or the beaches. H'ani led, Centaine over the rocky ground and showed her succulent plants which exactly resembled stones. They dug beneath the tiny inconspicuous leaves and found a bloated root the size of a football.

Centaine watched while H'ani grated the pulp of the root with her stone scraper, then took a handful of the shavings, held them high with her thumb pointed downwards like a teat on a cow's udder and squeezed. Milky liquid ran down her thumb and dribbled into her open mouth, and when she had squeezed out the last drop, she used all the remaining damp pulp to scrub her face and arms, grinning all the while with pleasure.

Quickly Centaine followed her example. The juice was quinnine-bitter, but after the first shock of the taste, Centaine found that it slaked her thirst more effectively that water alone, and when she had scrubbed her body with the pulp, the dryness caused by wind and sun and salt was alleviated and her skin felt and looked cleaner and smoother. The effect was to make her aware of herself for the first time since the shipwreck.

That evening as they sat around the fire waiting for the kebabs of limpets threaded on a piece of driftwood to broil, Centaine whittled a stick and with the point cleansed between her teeth, and then used her forefinger dipped in evaporated crystals of seasalt that she had scraped from the rocks to scrub them again. H'ani watched her knowingly, and after they had eaten, she came and squatted behind Centaine and crooned softly to her as she used a twig to pick the knots and tangles out of her hair, and then dressed it into tight new braids.

Centaine woke when it was still dark to the realization that a change had taken place while she slept. Although the fire had been built up, the light was weirdly diffused, and the excited voices of H'ani and O'wa were muted as though they came from a distance. The air was cold and heavy with moisture and it took Centaine a while to realize that they were enveloped in dense fog that had rolled in from the sea during the night, H'ani was hopping with excitement and impatience.

Come, Nam Child, hurry. Centaine's vocabulary already contained a hundred or so of the most important words of San, and she scrambled up.

Carry. Bring. H'ani pointed at the canvas container of ostrich eggs and then picking up her own leather bag scampered away into the fog. Centaine ran after her to keep her in sight, for the world had been obliterated by the pearly fog banks.

in the valley between the dunes H'ani dropped to her knees.

Look, Nam Child. She seized Centaine's wrists and drew her down beside her, and pointed to the desert plant that was spread out flat against the ground. The thick smooth skin that covered the stone-like leaves chameleoned to the exact colour of the surrounding earth. Water, H'anfl Centaine exclaimed delightedly. Water, Nam Child. H'ani cackled with laughter.

The fog had condensed on the smooth leaves and had run down the slanted surface to gather in the trough-like depressions of the point where the foreshortened stems disappeared into the earth. The plant was a marvellously designed gatherer of moisture, and Centaine understood now how that bloated subterranean root was replenished at each coming of the fog.

Quick! H'ani ordered. Sun come soon. She stood one of the empty ostrich shells upright in the soft earth and unplugged it. With a ball of animal fur she mapped up the glistening pool of dew and then squeezed it carefully into the egg-bottle. With that demonstration, she handed Centaine a wad of fur.

Work! she ordered.

Centaine worked as quickly as the old woman, listening to her chattering happily and understanding only an occasional word as they hurried from plant to plant.

This is a blessing indeed, the spirits are kind to send the water-smoke from the sea. Now the crossing to the Place of All Life will be less arduous. Without the watersmoke we might have perished. They have made the road smooth for us, Nam Child, perhaps your baby will be born at the Place of All Life. What a prodigious benevolence that would be. For then your child would have the special mark of the spirits upon him for all his life, he would be the greatest of hunters, the sweetest of singers, the nimblest of dancers and the most fortunate of all his clan. Centaine did not understand, but she laughed at the old woman, feeling lighthearted and happy, and the sound of her own laughter startled her, it had been so long and she replied to the old woman's chatter in French.

I had begun truly to hate this harsh land of yours, H'ani. After all the anticipation I had to see it, after all the wonderful things that Michel told me and all the things I had read about it, how different it all was, how cruel and how malicious. Hearing the tone of her voice, H'ani paused with the wet wad of fur poised over the egg-bottle and looked at her quizzically.

Just now was the first time I have laughed since I have been in Africa. Centaine laughed again, and H'ani giggled with relief and returned her attention to the bottle. This day Africa has shown me its first kindness. Centaine lifted the sodden fur to her lips and sucked the cold sweet dew from it. This is a special day, H'ani, this is a special day for me and my baby. When all the egg-bottles were brimming full and carefully replugged, they indulged themselves, drinking the dew until they were satiated, and only then did Centaine look around her and begin to appreciate what the fog meant to the plants and creatures of the desert.

Bright red ants had come up from their deep nests to take advantage of it. The worker-ants scurried from plant to plant, sucking up the droplets so that their abdomens swelled and became translucent, on the point of bursting before they disappeared back into the burrows. At the entrance to each burrow a cluster of other ants were assembled, the wedding party to see off the breeding queens and their consorts as they lifted into the foggy air on paper-white wings, fluttering off, most of them to die in the desert, but a very few of them to survive and found new colonies.

The sand lizards had come down from the dunes to feast an the flights of ants, and there were small rodents, gingery-red in colour, that hopped down the valley floor on overdeveloped hindlegs like miniature kangaroos.

Look, H'ani, what is this? Centaine had discovered a strange insect the size of a locust which was standing on its head in an exposed position. The dew condensed in silver droplets on its shiny iridescent armour plating, then trickled slowly down the grooves in the carapace and were channelled into the creature's hooked beak.

Good eat, H'ani told her and popped the insect into her mouth, crunched it up and swallowed it down with relish.

Centaine laughed at her, You dear, funny old thing. Then she looked around at the small secret life of the desert. What an enchanted land Africa is! At last I can understand a little of what Michel tried to explain to me. With an African abruptness that no longer surprised Centaine, the mood changed. The curtains of fog peeled away, the sun struck through and within minutes the gem-like droplets of dew had vanished from the stoneplants. The ants disappeared into their burrows, sealing the entrances behind them, and the sand lizards scurried back into the slippery dunes, leaving the dismembered paper wings of the flying ants they had devoured to blow idly on the small offshore wind.

At first the lizards, still chilled by the fog, basked on the sunny front of the dunes, but within minutes the heat was oppressive and they ran across the ridges of the slipface to shelter on the shady side, Later, when the noon sun dispelled all the shadows, they would dive below the surface and swim down through it to the cooler sands beneath.

H'ani and Centaine shouldered their carrying bags and, bowed under the weight of the egg-bottles, went down to the beach. O'wa was already at the camp and he had a dozen fat lizards impaled on a stick of driftwood, and a goodly bag of the gingery desert rats laid out on the flat stone beside the fire.

Oh, husband, what an intrepid provider you are. H'ani laid down her carrying bag the better to praise the old man's efforts. Surely there has never been a hunter of all the San to match your skills! O'wa preened quite unashamedly at the old woman's blatant flattery, and H'ani averted her face for a moment and her eyes flashed a message to Centaine in the secret language of womankind.

They are little boys, her smile said clearly. From eight to eighty, they remain children. And Centaine laughed again and clapped her hands and joined in H'ani's little pantomime of approbation.

O'wa good! O'wa clever! And the old man bobbed his head and looked solemn and important.

The moon was only four or five days from full, so that after they had eaten, it was bright enough to throw purple dark shadows below the dunes. They were all still too excited by the fog visitation to sleep, and Centaine was trying to follow and even join in the chatter of the two old San.

Centaine had by now learned the four click sounds of the San language, as well as that glottal choke which sounded as though the speaker was being strangulated.

However, she was still struggling to understand the tonal variations. The different tones were almost undetectable to the Western ear, and it was only in the last few days that Centaine had even become aware of their existence.

She had puzzled over the way H'ani seemed to repeat the same word and showed exasperation when Centaine had obviously not been able to detect any difference in the pronunciations. Then, quite suddenly, as though wax plugs had been removed from her ears, Centaine had heard five distinct inflexions, high, middle, low, rising and falling, that changed not only the sense of a word but the relationship of the word to the rest of the sentence.

It was difficult and challenging and she was sitting close to H'ani so she could watch her lips, when suddenly she let out a surprised gasp and clutched her stomach with both hands.

It moved! Centaine's voice was filled with wonder. He moved, the baby moved! H'ani understood immediately and she reached out swiftly and lifted Centaine's brief tattered skirt and clasped her stomach. Deep in her body there was another spasm of life, Ai! Ai! shrilled H'ani. Feel him! Feel him kick like a zebra stallion! Fat little tears of joy squeezed out of her slanted Chinese eyes and as they ran down the deep corrugated wrinkles on her cheeks, they sparkled in the light of the fire and the moon. So strong, so brave and strong!

Feel him, old grandfather. O'wa could not refuse such an invitation, and Centaine, kneeling in the firelight with her skirts lifted high over her naked lower body, felt no embarrassment at the old man's touch.

This, announced O'wa solemnly, is a most propitious thing. It is fitting that I should dance to celebrate it. And Uwa stood up and danced in the moonlight for Centaine's unborn infant.

The moon dipped into the dark, slumbrous sea, but already the sky over the land was turning to the colour of ripe orange at the approach of day and Centaine lay for only a few seconds after she awoke. She was surprised that the two old people still lay beside the dead ash of last night's fire, but she left the camp hurriedly, knowing that that day's trek would begin before sunrise.

At a discreet distance from the camp she squatted to relieve herself, then stripped off her rags and ran into the sea, gasping at the cold invigorating water as she scrubbed her body with handfuls of sand. She pulled her clothing over her wet body and ran back to the camp. The old people were still wrapped in their leather cloaks and lying so still that Centaine felt a moment of panic, but then H'ani coughed throatily and stirred.

They are still alive, anyway, Centaine smiled and assembled her few possessions, feeling virtuous for usually H'ani had to chivvy her, but now the old woman stirred again and mumbled sleepily.

Centaine understood only the words Wait, rest, sleep. Then H'ani subsided and pulled her cloak over her head again.

Centaine was puzzled. She fed a few sticks to the fire and blew up a flame, then sat to wait.

Venus, the morning star, lay on the backs of the dunes, but paled and faded at the approach of the sun, and still the two San slept on, and Centaine began to feel irritated by the inactivity. She was so strong and healthy already that she had actually been looking forward to the day's journey.

Only when the sun cleared the tops of the dunes did H'ani sit up and yawn and belch and scratch herselfGo? Centaine used the rising tone that changed the word into a question.

No, no, H'ani made the negative waving sign. Wait night, moon, go there. And she pointed with a quick stabbing thumb at the dunes.

Go land? Centaine asked, not sure that she understood.

Go land, H'ani agreed, and Centaine felt a quick thrill.

They were going to leave the seashore at last.

Go now? Centaine demanded impatiently.

Twice during the last few days when they had stopped to make camp, Centaine had climbed to the top of the nearest dune and stared inland. Once she had imagined the distant outline of blue mountains against the evening sky, and she had felt her spirit summoned away from this monotonous seascape towards that mysterious interior.

Go now? she repeated eagerly, and O'wa laughed derisively as he came to squat at the fire.

The monkey is eager to meet the leopard, he said, but listen to it squeal when it does! H'ani clucked at him in disapproval and then turned to Centaine. Today we will rest. Tonight we will begin the hardest part of our journey. Tonight, Nan Child, do you understand that? Tonight, with the moon to light us.

Tonight, while the sun sleeps, for no man nor woman can walk hand in hand with the sun through the land of the singing sands. Tonight. Rest now. Tonight, Centaine repeated.

Rest now. But she left the camp and once again climbed up through the sliding slippery sands to the top of the first line of dunes.

On the beach four hundred feet below her, the two tiny figures sitting at the campfire were insignificant specks.

Then she turned to look inland and she saw that the dune on which she stood was a mere foothill to the great mountains of sand that rose before her.

The colours of the dunes shaded from pale daffodil yellow, through gold and orange, to purplish-brown and dark song de boeuf, but beyond them she imagined she saw ghost mountains with rocky crenellated peaks. Even as she stared, however, the horizon turned milky-blue and began to waver and dissolve, and she felt the heat come out of the desert, a whiff of it only, but she recoiled from its scalding breath, and before her eyes the land was veiled by the glassy shimmering veils of heat mirage.

She turned and went down to the camp again. Neither O'wa nor H'ani was ever completely idle. Now the old man was shaping arrowheads of white bone, while his wife was putting together another necklace, fashioning the beads from pieces of broken ostrich shell, chipping them into coins between two small stones and then drilling a hole through each with a bone sliver and finally stringing the finished beads on a length of gut.

Watching her work Centaine was reminded vividly of Anna. She stood up quickly and left the camp again, and H'ani looked up from the string of beads.

Nam Child is unhappy, she said.

There is water in the egg-bottles and food in her belly, o'wa. grunted as he sharpened his arrowhead. She has no reason to be unhappy. She pines for her own clan, H'ani whispered, and the old man did not reply. Both of them understood vividly and were silent as they remembered those they had left in shallow graves in the wilderness.

I am strong enough now, Centaine spoke aloud, and I have learned how to keep alive. I don't have to follow them any more. I could turn back to the south again alone. She stood uncertainly, imagining what it would be like, and it was that single word that decided her.

Alone, she repeated. If only Anna were still alive, if only there was somewhere out there for me to go to, then I might attempt it. And she slumped down on the beach and hugged her knees despondently. There is no way back. I just have to go on. Living each day like an animal, living like a savage, living with savages. And she looked down at the rags which barely covered her body. I just have to go on, and I don't even know where, and her despair threatened to overwhelm her completely. She had to fight it off as though it were a living adversary. I won't give in, she muttered, I just won't give in, and when this is over I will never want again. I'll never thirst and starve nor wear rags and stinking skins again. She looked down at her hands. The nails were ragged and black with dirt and broken off down to the quick. She made a fist to cover them. Never again. My son and I will never want again, I swear it. it was late afternoon when she wandered back into the primitive camp site under the dunes. H'ani looked up at her and grinned like a wizened little ape, and Centaine felt a sudden rush of affection for her.

Dear H'ani, she whispered. You're all I have got left. And the old woman scrambled to her feet and came towards her, carrying the finished necklace of ostrich shell in both hands.

She stood on tiptoe and placed the necklace carefully over Centaine's head and arranged it fussily down her bosom, cooing with self-satisfaction at her handiwork.

It's beautiful, H'ani, Centaine's voice husked. Thank you, thank you so very much, and suddenly she burst into tears. And I called you a savage. Oh, forgive me.

With Anna you are the sweetest, dearest person I've ever known. She knelt so that their faces were level and she hugged the old woman with a desperate strength, pressing her temple against H'ani's withered wrinkled cheek.

Why is she weeping? O'wa demanded from beside the fire.

Because she is happy. That, O'wa opined, is a most stupid reason. I think this female is a little moon-touched. He stood up, and still shaking his head, began the final preparations for the night's journey.

The little old people were unusually solemn, Centaine noticed, as they adjusted their cloaks and carrying satchels, and H'ani came to her and checked the sling of her bag, then knelt to adjust the canvas booties bound around Centaine's feet.

What is it? Their serious mien made Centaine uneasy.

H'ani understood the question, but did not try to explain. Instead she called Centaine and the two of them fell in behind O'wa.

O'wa raised his voice. Spirit of Moon, make a light for us in this night to show us the path. He used the cracked falsetto tone which all the spirits particularly enjoyed, and he performed a few shuffling dance steps in the sand. Spirit of Great Sun, sleep well, and when you rise tomorrow be not angry, that your anger burn us up in the singing sands. Then when we have passed safely through and have reached the sip-wells, we will dance for you and sing our thanks. He finished the short dance with a leap and a stamp of his small childlike feet. That was enough for now, a small down payment, with the balance promised when the spirits had honoured their part of the contract.

Come, old grandmother, he said. Make sure that Nam Child stays close and does not fall behind. You know that we cannot turn back to search for her if she does. And in that quick, swaying jog, he started up the slope of the beach into the mouth of the valley, just as the moon broke clear of the darkening horizon and started its journey across the starry heavens.

It was strange to travel in the night, for the desert seemed to take on new and mysterious dimensions, the dunes seemed taller and closer, decked in silver moonlight and dark purple shadows, and the valleys between them were canyons of silence, while above it all the vast panoply of the stars and the milky way and the moon were closer and brighter than Centaine had ever believed possible. She had the illusion that by simply reaching up she could pluck them down like ripe fruit from the bough.

The memory of the ocean stayed with them long after it was out of sight, the soft hiss of their footsteps in the sand seined to echo its gentle kissing surf on the yellow beaches, and the air was still cooled by its vast green waters.

They had been following the valley for almost a half of the moon's rise to its zenith when suddenly Centaine trotted into an eddy of heat. After the ocean-cooled airs it was like running into a solid barrier. Centaine gasped with surprise and H'ani murmured without breaking the rhythm of her gait, Now it begins."But they passed swiftly through it, and beyond the air was so cold by contrast that Centaine shivered and drew her cloak closer about her shoulders.

The valley twisted and as they came around the corner of a towering dune on which the moon shadows lay like bruises, the desert breathed upon them again.

Stay close, Nam Child. But the heat had a viscosity and weight so that Centaine felt that she was wading into a lava flow. At midnight it was hotter than in the boiler room at Mort Homme with the furnace stoked with oak logs, and as she breathed it into her lungs, she felt the heat entering her body like an invader, and with each breath expelled, she could feel it taking her moisture like a thief.

They paused once, only briefly, and drank from an eggbottle. Both H'ani and O'wa watched carefully as Centaine lifted it to her lips, but neither of them had to caution her now.

When the sky began to lighten, O'wa slackened his pace a little, and once or twice paused to survey the valley with a critical eye. It was obvious that he was choosing a place to wait out the day, and when at last they halted, it was close under the lee of a steep dune wall.

There was no material for a fire, and H'ani offered Centaine a piece of sun-dried fish wrapped in seaweed, but she was too tired and hot to eat and afraid also that food would increase her thirst during the day ahead. She drank her ration of water from the egg-bottle, and then wearily stood up and moved a short distance from the others. But as soon as she squatted, H'ani let out a shrill reprimand and hurried to her.

No! she repeated, and Centaine was embarrassed and confused, until the old woman fished in her satchel and brought out the dried wild gourd that she used as a bowl and ladle.

Here, this one - She proffered it to Centaine, who still did not understand. Exasperated, the old woman snatched back the gourd and holding it between her own legs urinated into it. Here, do. She offered the bowl to Centaine again.

I can't, H'ani, not in front of everybody, Centaine protested modestly.

O'wa, come here,H'ani called. Show the child."The old man came across and noisily reinforced H'anils demonstration.

Despite her embarrassment, Centaine could not help feeling a touch of envy. How much more convenient! Now, do! Rani offered her the gourd once again, and Centaine capitulated. She turned away modestly and with both the old people encouraging her loudly, she added her own tinkling stream to the communal gourd. H'ani bore it away triumphantly.

Hurry, Nam Child, she beckoned. The sun will come soon. And she showed Centaine how to scoop a shallow trench in the sand in which to lie.

The sun struck the face of the dune on the opposite side of the valley, and it flung reflected heat at them like a mirror of polished bronze. They lay in the strip of shade and cringed into their trenches.

The sun rose higher and the dune shadow shrank. The heat rose and filled the valley with silvery mirage so that the dunes began to dance, and then the sands began to sing. It was a low but pervading vibration as though the desert was the sounding box of a gigantic string instrument. It rose and fell and died away and then started again.

The sands are singing, H'ani told her quietly, and Centaine understood.

She lay with her ear to the ground and listened to the strange and wonderful music of the desert.

Still the heat increased, and following the example of the San, Centaine covered her head with the canvas shawl and lay quietly. It was too hot to sleep, but she fell into a sort of stupefied coma, and rode the long swelling waves of heat as though they were the sound of the sea.

Still it became hotter, and the shade shrivelled away as the sun nooned, and there was no relief or asylum from its merciless lash, Centaine lay and panted like a maimed animal, and each quick and shallow breath seemed to abrade her throat and burn the strength from her body.

It can't get worse, she told herself. This is the end of it, soon it will begin to cool. She was wrong. The heat grew stronger yet and the desert hissed and vibrated like a tortured beast, and Centaine was almost afraid to open her eyes lest it sear her eyeballs.

Then she heard the old woman moving and she lifted the corner of her head cover and watched her carefully mixing sand into the gourdful of urine. She brought the bowl to where Centaine lay and plastered the wet sand over her baking skin.

Centaine gasped with relief of the cool touch of it, and before it could dry in the fierce beat, H'ani filled in the shallow trench with loose sand, burying Centaine under a thin layer and then arranging the shawl over her head.

Thank you, H'ani, Centaine whispered, and the old woman went to cover her husband.

With the damp sand next to her skin and the protective layer over that, Centaine lasted out those hottest hours of the desert day, and then with that African suddenness she felt the temperature on her cheeks change, and the sunlight was no longer stark dazzling white, but shaded with a mellow, buttery tone.

At nightfall they rose out of their beds and shook themselves, throwing off the sand. They drank in a transport that was almost religious, but again Centaine could not force herself to eat, and then O'wa led them off.

Now there was no novelty or fascination for Centaine in the night's trek, and the heavenly bodies were no longer marvels to gaze upon with awe but merely instruments to mark the long tortuous passage of the hours.

The earth beneath got its character from loose sand that gave under each step and ragged at her feet, to hard, compacted mica flats where the flowerlike crystals called desert roses had edges to them like knives; they cut through her canvas sandals, and she had to pause to rebind them. Then they left the flats and crossed the low spine of a sub-dune, and from its crest saw another vast valley yawn before them.

O'wa never wavered or showed the least hesitation.

Although Centaine realised that these mountains of sand would walk before the prevailing winds, endlessly changing shape, trackless and unknowable, yet the little man moved through them the way a master mariner rides upon the shifting currents of the ocean.

The silence of the desert seemed to enter Centaine's head like molten wax, deadening her sense of hearing, filling her eardrums with the sussurations of nothingness as though she held a seashell to her ear.

Will the sand never end? she asked herself. Is this a continent of dunes? In the dawn they halted and prepared their defences to resist the siege of the sun, and in the hottest hour of the day as Centaine lay in her shallow grave-like bed, coated with urine-damp sand, she felt her baby move within her more strongly this time, as though he too were fighting the heat and the thirst.

Patience, my darling, she whispered to him. Save your strength. We must learn the lessons and the ways of this land, so that we will never have to suffer like this again, Never again. That evening, when she rose from the sand, she ate a little of the dried fish for the baby's sake, but as she had feared, the food made her thirst almost insupportable.

However, the strength it gave her bore her up through the night's journey.

She did not waste strength by speaking aloud. All three of them were conserving energy and moisture, no unnecessary words or actions, but Centaine looked up at the sky as it made its grand and ponderous revolution, and she could still see Michael's star standing across the black void of the South Pole from her own.

Please let it end, she prayed silently to his star. Let it end soon, for I don't know how much longer I can go on. But it did not end, and it seemed that the nights grew longer, the sand deeper and more cloying around her feet, while each day seemed fiercer than the last and the heat beat down upon them like a blacksmith's hammerstrokes on the iron of the anvil.

Centaine found that she had lost track of the days and nights, they had blended in her mind into a single endless torment of heat and thirst.

Five days, or six or even seven? she wondered vaguely, and then she counted the empty egg-bottles. It must be six, she decided. Only two full bottles left. Centaine and H'ani each placed one of the full bottles in their pack, sharing the load exactly, then they ate the last shreds of dried fish and stood up to face the night's journey, but this time it did not begin immediately.

O'wa stared for a while into the east, turning his head slightly from side to side as though he were listening, and for the first time Centaine detected a fine shade of uncertainty in the way he held his small head with its crownlike nimbus of arrow shafts. Then O'wa began to sing softly in what Centaine had come to recognize as his ghost-voice.

Spirit of great Lion Star, he looked up to Sirius shining in the constellation of Canis Major, you are the only one who can see us here, for all the other spirits avoid the land of singing sand. We are alone, and the journey is harder than I remember it when I passed here as a young man. The path has become obscure, great Lion Star, but you have the bright eye of a vulture and can see it all.

Lead us, I beg of you. Make the path clear for us.

Then he took the egg-bottle from H'ani's satchel and drew the stopper and spilled a little of the water on to the sand. It formed small round balls, and Centaine made a little moaning sound in her throat and sank on to her knees.

See, spirit of great Lion Star, we share water with you, O'wa sang and replugged the bottle, but Centaine stared at the little wet balls of sand and moaned again.

Peace, Nam Child, H'ani whispered to her. To receive a special boon, it is sometimes necessary to give up what is precious. She took Centaine's wrist and pulled her gently to her feet, and then turned to follow O'wa over the endless dunes.

With the silences deafening her, and weariness a crushing burden to carry, and thirst a raging torment, Centaine struggled on, once again losing all sense of time or distance or direction, seeing nothing but the two dancing figures ahead of her, transformed by the rays of the waning moon into tiny hobgoblins.

They stopped so suddenly that Centaine ran into H'ani and would have fallen had not the old woman steadied her, and then quietly drawn her down until they lay side by side.

What, Centaine began, but H'ani placed a hand over her mouth to quieten her.

O'wa lay beside them, and when Centaine was quiet he pointed over the lip of the dune on which they were lying.

Two hundred feet below at the dune's foot began a level plain, awash with soft silver moonlight. It reached to the very limit of Centaine's night vision, flat, without end, and it gave her hope that at last the dunes were behind them. Upon this plain stood a scattered forest of longdead trees.

Leprous-grey in the moonlight, they lifted the blighted and twisted limbs of arthritic beggars of an uncaring sky.

The weird scene invoked in Centaine a superstitious chill, and when something large but shapeless moved amongst the ancient trees like a monster from mythology, she shivered and wriggled closer to H'ani.

Both the San were trembling with eagerness like hunting dogs on the leash, and H'ani shook Centaine's hand and pointed silently. As Centaine's eyes adjusted, she saw that there were more living shapes than the one she had first spotted, but they were as still as great grey boulders.

She counted five of them altogether.

Lying on his side, O'wa was restringing his little hunting bow, and when he had tested the tension of its string, he selected a pair of arrows from the leather band around his forehead, made a sign to H'ani and then slithered back from the crest of the dune. Once he was off the skyline, he leaped to his feet and slipped away into the shadows and folds of windblown sands.

The two women lay behind the ridge, still and silent as the shadows. Centaine was learning the animal patience that this ancient wilderness demanded of all its creatures. The sky began to bloom with the first promise of day, and now she could see more clearly the creatures on the plain below them.

They were huge antelopes. Four of them lying quietly, while one of them, larger and more thickset in shoulders and neck, stood a little apart. Centaine judged that he was the herd bull, for at his shoulder he stood as tall as Nuage, her beloved stallion, but he carried a magnificent pair of horns, long and straight and vicious, and Centaine was reminded vividly of the tapestry La Dame d la Licorne at the Muse de Cluny, which her father had taken her to see on her twelfth birthday.

The light strengthened and the bull gleamed a lovely soft mulberry-fawn colour. His face was marked with F darker lines in a diamond pattern, that looked as though he were wearing a head halter, but there was that wild dignity about him that immediately dispelled any suggestion of captivity.

He swung his noble head towards where Centaine lay, extended his trumpet-like ears and swished his dark bushy horse-like tail uneasily. H'ani laid her hand on Centaine's arm and they shrank down. The bull stared in their direction for many minutes, rigid and still as a marble carving, but neither of the women moved, and at last the bull lowered his head and began to dig in the loose earth of the plain with his sharp black forehooves.

All, yes! Dig for the sweet root of the hi plant, great and splendid bull, O'wa exhorted him silently. Do not lift your head, you marvelous chieftain of all gemsbok, feed well, and I will dance you such a dance that all the spirits of the gemsbok will envy you for ever! O'wa lay one hundred and fifty feet from where the gemsbok bull was standing, still far beyond the range of his puny bow. He had left the shadow of the dune valley almost an hour before, and in that time had covered less than five hundred paces.

There was a slight depression in the surface of the plain, a mere indentation less than a hand's span deep, but even in the vague light of the moon O'wa had picked it out unerringly with his hunter's eye and he had slid into it like a small amber-coloured serpent, and like a serpent moved on his belly with slow, sinuous undulations and silent prayers to the spirits of Lion Star who had guided him to this quarry.

Suddenly the gemsbok flung up his head and stared about him suspiciously, ears flared wide.

Don't be alarmed, sweet bull, O'wa urged him. Smell the hi tuber and let peace enter your heart again. The minutes stretched out, and then the bull blew a small fluttery sound through his nostrils, and lowered his head. His harem of fawn-coloured cows who had been watching him warily relaxed, and their jaws began working again as they chewed on the cud.

o'wa slithered forward, moving under the flattened lip of the depression, his cheek touching the earth so as not to show a head silhouette, pushing himself over the soft earth with his hips and his knees and his toes.

The gemsbok had rooted out the tuber and was chewing on it with noisy gusto, holding it down with a forehoof to break off a mouthful, and O'wa closed the gap between them with elaborate, patient stealth.

Feast well, sweet bull, without you three persons and an unborn child will be dead by tomorrow's sun. Do not , great gemsbok, stay a while, just a little while longer. He was as close as he dared approach now, but it was still too far. The gemsbok's hide was tough and his fur thick. The arrow was a light reed, and the point was bone that could not take the same keen edge as iron.

Spirit of Lion Star, do not turn your face away now, O'wa beseeched, and raised his left hand so that the tiny pale-coloured palm was turned towards the bull.

For almost a minute nothing happened, and then the bull noticed the disembodied hand that seemed to rise out of the earth, and he lifted his head and stared at it. It seemed too small to be dangerous.

After a minute of utter stillness, O'wa wriggled his fingers seductively and the bull blew through his nostrils and stretched out his muzzle, sucking in air, trying to get the scent, but O'wa was working into the small, fitful morning breeze, with the deceptive dawn light behind him.

He held his hand still again and then slowly lowered it to his side. The bull took a few paces towards him and then froze, another few paces, craning inquisitively, ears pricked forward, he peered at the shallow indentation where O'wa lay pressed to the earth without breathing.

Then the bull's curiosity took him forward again into range of O'wa's bow.

In a flash of movement, like the strike of the adder, O'wa rolled on to his side, drew the eagle feather flights to his cheek and let the arrow fly. It darted like a bee across the space between them and alighted with a slapping sound on the patterned cheek of the bull, fixing its barbs in the soft skin below his trumpet-like ear.

The bull reared back at the sting of it, and whirled away. Instantly his harem cows sprang from their sandy couches into full gallop and the whole herd went away after the running bull, switching their long dark tails and dragging a pale train of dust behind them.

The bull was shaking his head, trying to rid himself of the the arrow that dangled from his cheek, and he swerved in his run and deliberately brushed his head against the trunk of one of the ancient dead trees.

Stick deep! O'wa was on his feet, capering and yelling. Hold fast, arrow, carry the poison of O'wa to his heart.

Carry it swiftly, little arrow. The women came running down from the dune to join him.

Oh, what a cunning hunter, H'ani lauded her husband, and Centaine was breathless but disappointed for the herd was already out of sight across the dark plain, lost in the grey of predawn. Gone? she asked H'ani.

Wait, the old woman answered. Follow soon. Watch now. O'wa make magic. The old man had laid aside his weapons, except for two arrows which he arranged in his headband to prick up at the same angle as the horns of a gemsbok. Then he cupped his hands on each side of his head into trumpet-shaped ears, and subtly altered his entire stance and the way he carried his head. He snorted through his nostrils and pawed at the ground, and before Centaine's eyes was transformed into a gemsbok. The mimicry was so faithful that Centaine clapped her hands delightedly.

o'wa went through the panotominie of seeing the beckoning hand, approaching it warily, and then being struck by the arrow. Centaine had a sense of due,! vu, so accurately was the incident portrayed.

O'wa galloped away with the same stride and carriage as the gemsbok, but then he began to weaken and stagger.

He was panting, his head drooping, and Centaine felt a pang of sympathy for the stricken beast. She thought of Nuage and tears sprang into her eyes, but H'ani was clapping and uttering little shrieks of encouragement.

Die, oh bull that we revere, die that we may live! O'wa blundered in a wide circle, his horned head too heavy to carry, an he sagged to the earth and went into the final convulsions as the poison coursed through his blood.

It was all so convincing that Centaine was no longer seeing the little San, but rather the bull that he was portraying. She did not for a moment doubt the efficacy for the sympathetic spell that O'wa was weaving over his quarry.

Ah! H'ani cried. He is down. The great bull is finished, and Centaine believed without question.

They drank from the egg-bottles, and then O'wa broke a straight branch from one of the dead trees and shaped one end to fit the spearhead made from the thighbone of a buffalo which he carried in his pouch. He bound the spearhead in place and weighed the heavy weapon in his hand.

It is time to go after the bull, he announced, and led off across the plain.

Centaine's first impression was correct. They had passed beyond the dune country, but the plain that lay ahead of them was every bit as forbidding, and the strange shapes of the dead forest gave it a surreal and otherworldly feeling.

Centaine wondered how long ago the forest had died, and shivered as she realized that these trees might have stood like this for a thousand years, preserved by the desiccated air as the mummies of the pharaohs had been.

O'Wa was following the tracks of the gemsbok herd, and even over the hard pebbled expanses of the plain where Centaine could see no sign of their passing, the little San led them at a confident unwavering trot. He paused only once to pick up the shaft of his arrow, lying at the base of the dead tree upon which the bull had brushed itself. He held it up and showed it to the women. See. The barb has struck. The head of the arrow was missing. O'wa had deliberately designed it in two pieces with a weak section just at the back of the poisoned barb so that it would break away.

The light improved swiftly, and H'ani, trotting ahead of Centaine, pointed with her digging stick. At first Centaine could not see what she was indicating, then she noticed a small dried vine with a few parched brown leaves lying close to the earth, and the first sign of living plant life since they had left the coast.

Because she now knew where and how to look, Centaine noticed other plants, brown and blasted and insignificant, but she had learned enough of this desert to guess what lay beneath the surface. It gave her spirits a small lift when she noticed the first scattered clumps of fine silver dry desert grass. The dunes were behind them, and the land about them was coming alive again.

The morning breeze that had aided O'wa in his stalk persisted after the sun had cleared the horizon, so the heat was not as oppressive as it had been in the dune country. The whole temper of the San was lighter and more carefree, and even without H'ani's assurances 'Good now, eat, drink soon', Centaine was sure that they had passed through the worst stage of the journey.

She had to screw up her eyes and shade them, for already the low sun sparkled in dazzling points of white light from the mica chips and bright pebbles and the sky was aglow with a hot soapy radiance that dissolved the horizon and washed out all colour and altered shape and substance.

Far ahead of them Centaine saw the humped shape lying, and beyond it the four gemsbok cows lingering loyalty but fearfully by their fallen liege bull. They abandoned him at last only when the little file of human shapes was within a mile, and they galloped away into the shimmering heat haze.

The bull lay as O'wa had mimed him, panting and so weakened by the poison of the arrowhead that his head rolled and his long straight annulated horns waggled from side to side. His eyes glistened with tears and his eyelashes were as long and curved as those of a beautiful woman, yet he tried to rise to defend himself as O'wa faced him, and hooked with those rapier horns that could impale a full-grown lion, swinging them in a vicious flashing arc, before sagging back.

O'wa circled him cautiously, seeming so frail against the animal's bulk, waiting for his opening, the clumsy spear poised, but the bull dragged its semi-paralysed body around to face him. The arrowhead still dangled from the wound beneath his ear, and the lovely black and white pattern of his face mask was smeared with dark coagulated blood from the poisoned wound.

Centaine thought of Nuage again, and she wanted the suffering to end quickly. She laid down her satchel, loosened her skirt and held it like a matador's cape and sidled up to the stricken bull on the far side from O'wa.

Be ready, O'wa, be ready! The bull turned to her voice.

She caped the bull and he lunged at her, his horns hissed in the air like a swinging cutlas, and he dragged himself towards her, kicking up dust with his giant hooves, and Centaine leaped nimbly aside.

As he was distracted, O'wa rushed forward and lanced the bull in the throat, driving the bone spearhead deep, twisting and worrying it, seeking the cartoid artery. Bright arterial blood sprayed like a flamingo feather in the sunlight, and O'wa leapt back and watched him die.

Thank you, great bull. Thank you for letting us live.

Between them they rolled the carcass on to its back, but when O'wa prepared to make the first cut with his flint knife, Centaine opened the blade of her clasp knife and handed it to him.

O'wa hesitated. He had never touched that beautiful weapon. He believed that if he did it might cleave to his fingers and he would never be able to give it up again.

Take, O'wa, Centaine urged him, and when he still hesitated, staring at the knife with a timid reverence, Centaine with a sudden intuitive flash realized the true reason for O'wa's antagonism towards her.

He wants the knife, he is lusting after it. She almost laughed but controlled it. Take, O'wa, and the little man reached out slowly and took it from her hand.

He turned it lovingly between his fingers. He stroked the steel, caressing the blade, and then tested the edge with his thumb.

Ai! All be exclaimed as the steel sliced through his skin and raised a beaded chain of blood drops across the ball of his thumb. What a weapon. Look, H'ani! He displayed his injured thumb proudly. See how sharp it is! My stupid husband, it is usual to cut the game and not the hunter! O`wa cackled happily at the joke, and bent to the task.

He took the bull's scrotum in his left hand and drew it out, then with a single stroke lopped it free.

Ai! How sharp! He laid the scrotum aside, the testicles grilled on the coals were a delicacy and the sac of soft skin would make a fine pouch for arrowheads and other small valuables.

Starting from the wound between the bull's hindlegs, he made a shallow cut through the skin, angling the blade forward so as not to pierce the belly cavity. He led the cut with his forefinger hooked under the skin, up between the bull's forelegs under its throat to the point of the chin.

He made ring cuts around the bull's neck, and around the hocks of all four limbs, then sliced down the inside of the legs until he intercepted the first long lateral incision.

With the women pulling on the white underside of the skin and the blue marbled muscles sheathed in their transparent capsules, they flayed the hide off the carcass in a single sheet. It made a soft, tearing crackling sound as it came away; they spread it out, fur-side down on the ground.

Then O'wa opened the stomach cavity with the precision of a surgeon, lifted out the heavy wet viscera and laid them on the sheet of skin.

H'ani scurried away and collected a bunch of the fine pale desert grass. She had to range widely, for the clumps of grass were scattered and sparse. She hurried back and arranged the grass over the gourd bowl, while O'wa slit open the slippery white bag of the bull's rumen and lifted out a double handful of the contents. Water dribbled from the undigested vegetation even before O'wa began to squeeze it out.

Using the bunch of grass as a sieve, O'wa filled the gourd with fluid and then lifted it with both hands to his lips. He drank deeply, closing his eyes with ecstasy, and when he lowered the bowl, he belched thunderously and grinned hugely as he passed the gourd to H'ani. She drank noisily and finished with a belch and a hoot of appreciation, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand as she passed the gourd to Centaine.

Centaine examined the pale greenish-brown liquid. It's only vegetable juice, she consoled herself. It hasn't even been chewed or mixed with gastric juices yet- and she lifted the gourd.

it was much easier than she had anticipated, and it tasted like a broth of herbs and grass, with the bitter aftertaste of the hi tuber. She handed the empty gourd back to O'wa, and while he squeezed and strained the rest of the contents of the rumen, she imagined the long table at Mort Homme set with silver and crystal and SEvres porcelain, and the way Anna fussed over the flowers, the freshness of the turbot, the temperature of the wine and the exact shade of pink of the slices of freshly carved filet, and she laughed aloud. She had come a long, long way from Mort Homme.

The two little San laughed with her in complete misunderstanding, and they all drank again and then again.

Look at the child, H'ani invited her husband. In this land of the singing sand I feared for her, but already she blooms like the desert flowers after the rain. She is a strong one, with the liver of a lion, did you see how she helped at the moment of the kill, by drawing the eye of the bull to herself? H'ani nodded and cackled and belched. She will breed a fine son, you hear the word of old H'ani, a fine son indeed. O'wa, his belly ballooning with good water, grinned and was about to concede, when his eye dropped to the knife that lay between his feet, and the grin faded.

Silly old woman, you chatter like the brainless spotted guinea fowl, while the meat spoils. He snatched up the knife. Envy was an emotion so alien to his nature that O'wa was deeply unhappy and not really certain of the reason why, but the thought of handing the knife back to the girl filled him with a corrosive anger that he had never known before. He frowned and muttered as he dressed out the viscera of the bull, cutting thin slices of the rubbery white tripes and chewing them raw as he worked.

It was midmorning before they had festooned the branches of one of the dead trees with long ribbons of bright scarlet gemsbok meatf and the heat built up so swiftly that the meat darkened and dried out almost immediately.

It was too hot to eat. Between them H'ani and Centaine spread the wet gemsbok skin over a framework of dead branches and they huddled under this tent-like structure, taking refuge from the sun, cooling their bodies with the evaporating fluids of the gemsbok's secondary stomach.

At sundown O'wa took out his fire sticks and began the laborious process of coaxing a spark from them, but impatiently Centaine took the ball of dry kindling from him. Up to that time she had always been too intimidated by the little San and her own feeling of total inadequacy to make any show of initiative. Now, somehow, the crossing of the dunes and her part in the gemsbok hunt emboldened her, and she laid out the kindling and the knife and flint with the San looking on curiously.

She struck a shower of sparks into the kindling and stooped quickly to blow it into the flame. The San shrieked in amazement and consternation, and backed away in superstitious awe. Only once the fire was burning steadily could Centaine reassure them, and they crept back and marvelled over the steel and the flint. Under Centaine's tutelage, O'wa at last succeeded in striking sparks, and his joy was spontaneous and childlike.

As soon as the night brought relief from the heat of the sun, they prepared a feast of broiled liver and tripes and kidneys wrapped in the lacework of white fat that had enclosed the intestines. While the women worked at the fire, O'wa danced for the spirit of the gemsbok, and as he had promised, he leaped as high as he had done when he was a young man, and he sang until his voice cracked and failed. Then he squatted down at the fire and began to eat.

The two San ate with the fat greasing their chins and running down on to their cheeks; they ate until their stomachs were distended and bulged out like balloons, hanging down on their laps; they went on eating long after Centaine was gorged and satiated.

Every once in a while Centame was sure they were faltering, as their jaws slowed and they blinked at each other like sleepy owls in the firelight. Then O'wa would place both hands on his bulging stomach and roll on to one buttock, his wrinkled face contorted, and he would grunt and strain until he was able to clap off a resounding fart. Across the fire, H'ani would answer him with a squealing blast every bit as ear-splitting, and they both hooted with laughter and crammed more meat into their mouths.

As Centaine drifted off into sleep with her own stomach stuffed with meat, she realized this orgy was a natural reaction of a people accustomed to privation faced suddenly with a mountain of food and no means of preserving it. When she woke at dawn they were still feasting.

With the sun the two San lay under the tent of gemsbok hide, their bellies distended, and snored through the heat, but at sunset they blew up the fire and began feasting again. By this time what remained of the gemsbok was smelling high and strong, but this seemed if anything to stimulate their appetite.

When O'wa rose to stagger out of the firelight on private business, Centaine saw that his buttocks which had been slack and sagging and wrinkled when they came down from the dunes, were now tight and round and polished.

Just like a camel's hump, Centaine giggled, and H'ani giggled with her and offered her a slice of the belly fat, cooked brown and crisp.

Once again they slept through the day like a nest of pythons digesting the gargantuan banquet, but at sunset with the carrying bags packed with the hard black strips of dried gemsbok meat, O'wa led them eastwards across the moonlit plain. He carried the folded gemsbok skin balanced on his head.

Gradually the plain over which they travelled altered in character. Amongst the fine desert grasses there appeared scraggy little scrubs, not as high as Centaine's knee, and once O'wa stopped and pointed ahead at a tall ghostly shape that crossed with a high-stepping trot ahead of them in the night, a dark body fringed with fluffy white, and only as it disappeared into the shadows did Centaine realize that it was a wild ostrich.

At dawn O'wa spread the gemsbok hide as a surishelter and they waited out the day. At sunset they drank the last drops of water from the egg-bottles, and the San were quiet and serious as they set out again. Without water, death was only hours away.

At dawn, instead of going into camp immediately, O'wa stood for a long time examining the sky, and then he ranged in a half-circle ahead of their track, like a gundog quartering for the bird, lifting his head, turning it slowly from side to side, his nostrils sucking at the air. What is O'wa doing?

Centaine asked. Smell. H'ani snuffled to show her. Smell water. Centaine was incredulous. No smell water, H'ani."Yes! Yes!

Wait, you see. O'wa reached a decision. Come! he beckoned, and the women snatched up their satchels and hurried after him.

Within an hour Centaine realized that if O'wa was mistaken, then she was dead. The egg-bottles were empty, the heat and the sun were sucking the moisture out of her, and she would be finished before the real burning heat of noon fell upon them.

O'wa broke into a full run, the gait that the San calledthe horns, the run of the hunter when he sees the horns of his quarry on the skyline ahead, and the women under their burdens could not try to match him.

An hour later they made out his tiny form far ahead, and when they at last came up with him, he smiled a broad welcome and with a sweep of his arm announced grandly, O'wa has led you unerringly to the sip-wells of the elephant with one tusk."The origins of the name were lost far back in the oral history of the San. O'wa swaggered shamelessly as he led them down the gentle slope of the river bed.

It was a wide water-course, but Centaine saw immediately that it was completely dry, filled with sand as loose and friable as that of the dune country, and she felt her spirits drop sharply as she looked about her.

The winding serpentine water course was about a hundred paces wide, cutting through the gravel beds of the plain, and although there was no water, both banks were dark with much denser plant growth then the and flats beyond. The scrub was almost waist-high, with an occasional dull green bush rising above the rest. The San were chattering brightly, and H'ani followed closely behind her husband as he strutted about importantly in the sand of the river bed.

Centaine sank down, picked up a handful of the bright orange-coloured sand and let it trickle through her fingers disconsolately. Then for the first time she noticed that the river bed was widely trampled by the hooves of the gemsbok, and that in places the sand had been heaped as though children had been digging sandcastles. O'wa was now examining one of these piles critically, and Centaine dragged herself up and went to see what he had found.

The gemsbok must have been digging in the river bed, but sand had trickled into the hole, almost filling it. O'wa nodded sagely, and he turned to H'ani.

This is a good place. Here we will make our sip-well.

Take the child and show her how to build a shelter. Centaine was so thirsty and heat-lashed that she felt dizzy and sick, but she slipped off the strap of her bag and wearily climbed the river bank after H'ani to help her cut whippy saplings and thorny branches from the scrub.

in the river bed they quickly erected two rudimentary shelters, sticking the saplings into the sand in a circle, bending them over to meet on top and roofing one of them with branches and the other with the stiff, stinking gemsbok skin. They were the most primitive shelters, without sides and floored with river sand, but Centaine flopped gratefully into the shade and watched O'wa.

Firstly he removed the poisoned heads from his arrows, handling them with elaborate care, for a single scratch would be fatal. He wrapped each arrowhead in a scrap of raw hide and packed them into one of the pouches on his belt.

Then he began to fit the reed arrows together, sealing the joints with a ball of acacia gum, until he had a single length of hollow reeds longer than he was tall.

Help me, little flower of my life, he sweetened H'ani blatantly, and with their hands they began to dig together in the sand. To prevent the sand running back into the hole, they made it funnel-shaped, wide at the top and gradually narrowing until O'wa's head and shoulders disappeared into it, and at last he started throwing up handfuls of darker, damp sand.

Deeper still he dug, until H'ani had to hold him by the ankles while his entire body was jammed in the hole. At last, in response to muffled cries from the depths, she passed the long hollow reed down to him.

Upside down in the well, O'wa placed the open end of the reed carefully and then fitted a filter of twigs and leaves around the open end of it to prevent it becoming clogged. With both the women hauling on his ankles, they drew him out of the narrow well, and he emerged coated with orange sand. H'ani had to clean out his ears and brush it from the corms of his grey hair, and from his eyelashes.

Carefully, a handful at a time, O'wa refilled the well, leaving the filter and reed undisturbed, and when he was finished, he patted the sand down firmly, leaving a short length of the end of the reed pipe sticking out above the surface.

While O'wa put the finishing touches to his well, H'ani chose a green twig, stripped off the thorns and peeled it.

Then she helped Centaine unplug the egg-bottles and set them out in a neat row beside the well.

O'wa stretched himself out, belly down on the sand, and placed his lips over the end of the reed tube. H'ani squatted beside him attentively, the row of egg-bottles within reach and the peeled green twig in her hand.

I am ready, hunter of my heart! she told him, and O'wa began to suck.

From under her shelter Centaine watched as O'wa turned himself into a human bellows; his chest swelled and subsided, seeming to double in size with each hissing intake of air, and then Centaine could sense the impediment of a heavy load in the tube. O'wa's eyes closed tightly, disappearing behind a network of baggy wrinkles, and his face darkened with effort to the colour of toffee.

His body pumped and pulsated, he swelled like a bull frog and shrank and swelled again, straining to draw a heavy weight up the long thin reed tube.

Suddenly he made a mewing sound in his throat without breaking the rhythm of his powerful suctions, and H'ani leaned forward and gently fitted the peeled twig into the corner of his mouth. A diamond-bright drop of water bubbled out between O'wa's lips and slid down the twig; it quivered on the tip for an instant and then dropped into the egg-bottles that H'ani held below it.

Good water, singer of my soul, H'ani encouraged him. Good sweet water!

And the flow from the old man's mouth became a steady silver dribble, as he sucked it in and let it run on the exhale.

The effort required was enormous, for O'wa was lifting the water over six feet, and Centaine watched in awe as he filled one egg-bottle, then another, and still a third without pause.

H'ani squatted over him, tending him, encouraging him, adjusting the twig and the bottles, cooing to him softly, and suddenly Centaine was struck with a strange feeling of empathy for this pair of little old people. She realized how they had been forged by joy and tragedy and unremitting hardship into a union so fast and strong that they were almost a single entity. She saw how the hard years had gifted them with humour and sensitivity and simple wisdom and fortitude, but most of all with love, and she envied them without rancour.

If only, she thought, if only I could be bound to another human being as these two are bound to each other! And in that moment she realized that she had come to love them.

At last O'wa rolled away from the tube and lay gasping and panting and shaking like a marathon runner when the race is run, and H'ani brought one of the egg-bottles to Centaine. Drink, Nam Child, she offered it to Centaine.

Almost reluctantly, achingly aware of the effort that had gone into reaping each priceless drop, Centaine drank.

She drank sparingly, piously, and then handed the bottle back.

Good water, H'ani, she said. Though it was brackish and mingled with the old man's saliva, Centame now understood completely that the San definition of good water was any fluid which would sustain life in the desert.

She rose and went to where O'wa lay in the sand.

Good water, O'wa. She knelt beside him, and she saw how the effort had drained him, but he grinned up at her and bobbed his head, still too tired to rise.

Good water, Nam Child, he agreed.

Centaine unfastened the lanyard from around her waist and held the knife in both hands. it had saved her life already. It might do so again in the hard days ahead, if she kept it.

Take, O'wa, she offered it to him. Knife for O'wa. He stared at the knife, and the dark, blood-suffused tones of his wrinkled face paled, and a great devastation seemed to empty all expression from his eyes.

Take, O'wa, Centaine urged him.

It is too much, he whispered, staring at the knife with stricken eyes. It was a gift without price.

Centaine reached out, took his wrist and turned his hand upwards. She placed the knife in his hand and folded his fingers over it. Sitting in the harsh sunlight with the knife in his hand, O'wa's chest heaved as powerfully as it had as he drew water from the sip-well, and a tear welled out of the corner of one eye and ran down the deep groove alongside his nose.

Why are you weeping, you silly old man? H'ani demanded.

I weep for joy of this gift. O'wa tried to maintain dignity, but his voice choked, That is a stupid reason to weep, H'ani told him, and twinkled mischievously as she covered her laughter with one slim, graceful old band.

They followed the dry river bed into the east, but now the urgency that had accompanied their night marches through the dune country was left behind them, for there was good water under the sand.

They travelled from before sunrise until the heat drove them into shelter, and then from late afternoon until after dark; the pace was leisurely for they foraged and hunted on the march.

H'ani cut a special digging stick for Centaine, peeled it and hardened the point in the fire, and showed her how to use it. Within a few short days Centaine was recognizing the surface indications of many of the edible and useful tubers and plants. It soon became evident that though O'wa was so adept in the bushcraft and lore of the desert and that although his hunting and tracking skills were almost supernatural, it was the foraging and gathering of the women that provided their little clan with the staples of life. In the days and weeks when game was scarce or simply non-existent, they lived on the plants which the two of them brought into camp.

Although Centaine learned swiftly and her young eyes were hawk-sharp, she knew that she would never be able to match the innate knowledge and gifts of perception of the old woman. H'ani could find the plants and insects that gave no sign on the surface of their hiding-place deep down in the earth, and when she dug the hard dirt flew in all directions.

How do you do it? Centaine could at last demand, for her command of the San language increased every day she spent listening and responding to the old woman's chatter.

Like O'wa found the sip-wells from afar, H'ani explained. I smell it, Nam Child. Smell! Use your nose! You tease me, revered old grandmother! Centaine protested, but she watched Ram carefully after that, and she saw that she indeed gave every indication of smelling out the deep nests of termites to raid them of the crumbling white ant bread which she made into a foul-tasting but nutritious porridge.

Just like Kaiser Wilhelm, Centaine marvelled, and she called to H'ani ChercheP the way that she and Anna had called to the gross boar when they had hunted truffles in the forest at Mort Homme.

Cherche, H'ani! and the old woman laughed and hugged herself with glee at the joke she did not understand and then quite casually produced a miracle.

She and Centaine had fallen behind O'wa on the evening stage of the journey, for the old man had gone ahead to search for an ostrich nesting ground that he remembered from his last visit many years before.

The two of them were arguing amiably. No, no! Nam Child, You must not dig two roots from the same place. You must always walk past one before you dig again, I have told you that before! H'ani scolded.

Why? Centaine straightened up and pushed the thick bushy curls off her forehead, leaving a sweaty smear of mud on her face.

You must leave one for the children. Silly old woman, there are no children. There will be- H'ani pointed at Centaine's belly significantly. There will be. And if we leave nothing for them, what will they say of us when they are starving? But there are so many plants! Centaine was exasperated.

When O'wa finds the nest of the ostrich, he will leave some of the eggs. When you find two tubers, you will leave one of them, and your son will grow strong and smile when he repeats your name to his children. H'ani broke off from her lecture and scurried forward to a bare, stony patch on the bank of the dry river bed, her nose twitching as she stooped to examine the earth.

Cherche, H'ani! Centaine laughed at her, and H'ani ghed back as she started to dig, and then she dropped to her knees and lifted something from the shallow excavation.

This is the first one you have seen, Nam Child. Smell it. It tastes very good. She handed the lumpy, dirt-crusted, potato-like tuber to Centaine, and Centaine sniffed it gingerly, and her eyes flew wide open at the well-remembered aroma. Quickly she wiped the clinging dirt from the lumpy surface and bit into it.

H'ani, you old darling, she cried. It's a truffle! A real truffle. It's not the same shape or colour, but it smells and tastes just like the truffles from our own land! O'wa had found his ostrich nests and Centaine whipped one of the eggs in its own half-shell and mixed in the chopped truffles and cooked an enormous omelette aux truffes on a flat stone heated in the camp fire.

Despite the dirt from Centaine's fingers, which gave it a faintly greyish colour, and the grains of sand and eggshell chips that crunched under their teeth, they ate it with relish.

it was only afterwards as she lay under the primitive roof of twigs and leaves, that Centaine gave in to the homesickness which the taste of truffles had invoked, and she buried her face in the crook of her arm to muffle her sobs.

Oh, Anna, I would give anything, anything at all just to see your lovely ugly old face again.

As they followed the dry river bed, and the weeks turned into months, so Centaine's unborn child grew strongly With her sparse but healthy diet and the daily exercise of walking and- digging and carrying and reaching, the child never grew big and she carried it high, but her breasts filled out and sometimes when she was alone, scrubbing her body with the juicy pith of the hi tuber, she looked down at them proudly and admired the jaunty upward tilt of the rosy tips.

I wish you could see them now Anna, she murmured. You couldn't tell me I still look like a boy. But as always you'd complain about my legs, too long and thin and with hard muscles, oh, Anna, I wonder where you are.

One morning at sunrise when they had already been travelling for many hours, Centaine stopped on the top of a low rise and looked around her slowly.

The air was still cool from the night and so clear that she could see to the horizon. Later, with the heat, it would thicken to an opaline translucence and the sun would drain all colour from the landscape. The heat mirage would close in around her, and shapes would be weirdly deformed, the most mundane groups of rocks or clump of vegetation transformed into quivering monsters.

Now they were sharp-edged and rich with their true colours. The undulating plains were hazed with pale silver grasses, and there were trees, real, living trees, not those heat-struck ancient mummies that had stood upon the plains below the dunes.

These stately camel-thorn acacias grew well separated.

Their massive trunks, clad in rough crocodile-skin bark, were at odds with the wide umbrella-shaped crown of airy and delicate silvery-green foliage. In the nearest of them a colony of sociable weavers had built a communal nest the size of a haystack, each generation of these insignificant, dun-coloured little birds adding to it, until one day the weight would be too much and would split the great tree. Centaine had seen others lying on the earth beneath the shattered acacia, still attached to the supporting branches and stinking with carcasses of hundreds of fledglings and broken eggs.

Beyond this open forest there were steep hills rising abruptly out of the plain, the kopjes of Africa, riven by wind and split by the sun's heat into geometrical shapes as hard-edged as dragons teeth. The soft light of the early sun struck hues of sepia and red and bronze from their rocky walls, and the antediluvian kokerboom trees with their fleshy trunks and palm-like heads crowned their summits.

Centaine paused and leaned upon her digging stick, awed by the harsh grandeur of the scene. Upon the dustcoloured plain grazed herds of dainty antelope. They were pale as smoke and as insubstantial, graceful little animals with lyre-shaped horns, the lovely bright cinnamonbrown of their backs divided from the snow white lower parts by a lateral band of chocolate red.

As Centaine watched, the nearest antelopes took fright at the human presence, and began stotting, the characteristic alarm behaviour that gave them their name of springbok. They lowered their heads until their muzzles almost touched their four bunched hooves and shot stiff-legged straight into the air, at the same time opening the long folded pouch of skin that ran down their backs and flashing the feather mane of white hair that it concealed.

Oh, look at them, H'ani! Centaine cried. They are so beautiful. The alarm stotting was wildly infectious, and across the plain hundreds of springbok bounced on high, with white manes flashing.

O'wa dropped his burden, lowered his head and imitated them perfectly, prancing stiff-legged, flicking his fingers over his back, so that he seemed transformed into one of the fleet little antelope, and the two women were so overcome with laughter that they had to sit down and hug each other. The joy of it lasted long after the mountains had receded into the heat mists, and it alleviated the crushing misery of the noonday sun.

During those long halts in the middle of the day, O'wa took to separating himself from the women, and Centaine became accustomed to seeing his tiny figure sitting crosslegged in the shade of an adjacent came]-thorn tree, scraping with the clasp knife at the gemsbok skin that was spread across his lap. He carried the skin carefully folded and rolled into a bundle on his head during the day's march, and once when Centaine had begun to examine it casually, O'wa had become so agitated that she quickly placated him.

I meant no harm, old grandfather. But her curiosity had been piqued.

The old man was a craftsman, and usually he was delighted to show off his handiwork. He had not protested when Centaine watched as he split the pliable yellow bark off the trunk of a kokerboom tree, rolled it into a quiver to hold his spare arrows and decorated it with designs of birds and animals burned into the bark with a coal from the camp fire.

He showed her how to shape arrowheads from hard white bone by patiently grinding them against a flat stone, and Centaine was surprised at the keenness of the cutting edges and the points. He even took Centaine with him when he went out to hunt for the grubs from which be made the arrow poisons which had brought down the great gemsbok bull, and which could kill a man within hours. She helped him dig beneath a particular type of scrub and pick out of the dirt the brown pellet-like capsules which were the chrysalis in which the fat white grubs of the embryo diamphidia beetle were enclosed.

Handling the insects with elaborate caution, for the minutest quantity of their body juice entering through a scratch would mean lingering but certain death, O'wa pounded them to paste which he thickened with the juice of the wild sansevieria plant before dressing his arrowheads with the sticky mixture. From the sansevieria he separated the fibres from which he braided the twine to bind the arrow head to the shaft.

He even allowed Centaine to watch while he whittled a primitive pen-like flute on which he accompanied him self with piercing blasts when he danced, or while he carved the decorations into the heavy throwing stick which he used to knock the rocketing coqui francolin out of the air in a puff of pretty feathers or the blue-headed lizards from the uppermost branches of the camel-thorn trees, but when he worked on the gemsbok skin he went off to a discreet distance and he worked alone.

The river of sand which they had followed for so long finally contorted into a series of tight bends, like the convulsions of a dying adder, and then abruptly ended in a dry pan, go wide that the trees on the far side were merely a dark wavering line on the horizon. The surface of the pan was white with crystals of evaporated salts.

The reflection of the noon sun from this surface was painful to look at directly, and it turned the sky above it to pale silver. The Bushmen's name for it was the big white place.

On the steep bank of the pan they built shelters sturdier and better thatched than any of the others had been, giving an air of permanence to the camp, and the two little San settled down to an undemanding routine, albeit with an underlying air of expectancy which Centaine detected and queried.

Why do we stop here, H'ani? Each uneventful day made her more impatient and restless.

We wait to make the crossing, was all that the old woman would tell her.

Crossing to where? Where are we going? Centaine insisted, but H'ani became vague and pointed in a wide arc into the east, and answered with a name that Centaine could only translate as a place were nothing must die.

Centaine's child grew strongly within her pouting belly.

Sometimes it was difficult to breathe, and almost impossible to be comfortable on the bare ground. She made herself a nest of soft desert grass in her little sun shelter, which amused the two old people. For them the bare earth was bed enough, and they used their own shoulders are pillows.

Centaine lay in her nest and tried to count the days and months since she and Michael had been together, but time was blurred and telescoped so that all she could be sure of was that her time would be upon her soon. H'ani confirmed her estimate, probing her belly with gentle, knowing fingers.

The baby rides high and fights to be free. It will be a boy, Nam Child, she Promised, and took Centaine off into the desert to gather special herbs that they would need for the birthing.

Unlike many Stone Age peoples, the San were fully aware of the processes of procreation and saw sexual intercourse not as an isolated and random act, but as the first step in the long voyage to birth.

Where is the father of your growing infant, Nam Child? H'ani asked, and when she saw the tears in Centaine's eyes she answered herself softly. He is dead in the north lands at the ends of the earth. Is that not so?

How did you know that I came from the north? Centaine asked, glad to turn away from the pain of Michael's memory.

You are big, bigger than any of the San of the desert, H'ani explained.

Therefore you must come from a rich land where living is easy, a land of good rains and plentiful food. To the old woman water was all of life. The rain winds comes from the north, so you also must come from the north.

Intrigued by her logic, Centaine smiled. And how did you know I was from far away? I Your skin is pale, not darkened like the skin of the San. Here in the centre of the world the sun stands overhead, but it never goes north or south, and in the east and west it is low and wasting, so you must come from far away where the sun lacks the warmth and strength to darken your skin. Do you know of other people like me, H'ani, big people with pale skins? Have you ever before seen people like me? Centaine asked eagerly, and when she saw the shift in the old woman's gaze, she seized her arm. Tell me, wise old grandmother, where have you seen my people?

In what direction, and how far away? Would I be able to reach them? Please tell me. H'ani's eyes clouded with a film of incomprehension and she picked a grain of dried mucus from her nostril and examined it with minute attention.

Tell me, H'ani.1 Centaine shook her arm gently.

I have heard the old people talk of such things, H'ani grudgingly admitted, but I have never seen these people, and I do not know where they could be found. And Centaine knew she was lying. Then, in a sudden vehement gabble, Kain went on. They are fierce as lions and poisonous as the scorpion, the San hide from them- She jumped up in agitation, seized her satchel and digging stick and hurried from the camp and did not return until sunset.

That night after Centaine had curled in her grass bed, H'ani whispered to O'wa. The child yearns for her own people. I have seen her look southwards with sadness in her eyes, O'wa admitted.

How many days travel to reach the land of the pale giants? Ram asked reluctantly. How far to travel to her own clan? I Less than a moon, Olwa grunted, and they were both silent for a long time, staring into the hot bluish flames, of the camel-thorn log fire.

I want to hear a baby cry once more before I die, I H'ani said at last and O'wa nodded. And both their little heartshaped faces turned towards the east. They stared out into the darkness, towards the Place of All Life.

Once when H'ani found Centaine kneeling alone and praying in the wilderness, she asked, Who are you speaking to, Nam Child? and Centaine was at a loss, for though the San language was rich and complex in its descriptive powers of the material aspects of the desert world, it was extremely difficult to use it to convey abstract ideas.

However, after long discussion spread over many days while they foraged in the desert or worked over the cooking fire, Centaine managed to describe her concept of the Godhead, and H'ani nodded dubiously and mumbled and frowned as she considered it.

You are talking to the spirits? she asked. But most of the spirits live in the stars, and if you speak so softly, how will they hear you? It is necessary to dance and sing and whistle loudly to attract their attention. She lowered her voice. And it is even then not certain they will listen to you, for I have found the star spirits to be fickle and forgetful. H'ani glanced around her like a conspirator. It is my experience, Nam Child, that Mantis and Eland are much more reliable. Mantis and Eland? Centaine tried not to show her amusement.

Mantis is an insect with huge eyes that see all and with arms like a little man. Eland is an animal, oh, yes, much larger than the gemsbok, with a dewlap so full of rich fat that it sweeps the earth. The San's love of fat was almost equal to their love of wild honey. And twisted horns that sweep the sky. If we are fortunate we will find both Mantis and Eland at the place to which we are going.

In the meantime, talk to the stars, Nam Child, for they are beautiful, but put your trust in Mantis and Eland. Thus simply H'ani explained the religion of the San, and that night she and Centaine sat under a brilliant sky and she pointed out Orion's glittering train.

That is the herd of celestial zebras, Nam Child, and there is the inept huntsman, she picked out the star Aldebaran, sent by his seven wives, she stabbed a gnarled finger at the Pleiades, to find meat. See how he has shot his arrow, and it has flown high and wide to fall at the feet of Lion Star. Sirius, the brightest of all the fixed stars, seemed truly lionlike. And now the huntsman is afraid to retrieve his arrow and afraid to return to his seven wives, and he sits there forever twinkling with fear, which is just like a man, Nam Child. H'ani hooted with laughter, and dug her bony thumb into her husband's scrawny ribs.

Because the San were also star-lovers, Centaine's bond of affection for them was so strengthened that she pointed out Michael's star and her own in the far south.

But, Nam Child, O'wa protested, how can that star belong to you? It belongs to no one and to everybody, like the shade of the camel-thorn, and the water in the desert pool, or the land on which we tread, to nobody and yet to everybody. Nobody owns the eland, but we may take of his fat if we have need. Nobody owns the big plants but we may gather them on condition that we leave some for the children. How can you say that a star belongs to you alone? It was an expression of the philosophy which was the tragedy of his people, a denial of the existence of property which had doomed them to merciless persecution, to massacre and slavery or to exile in the far reaches of the desert where no other people could exist.

So the monotonous days of waiting were passed in discussion and the leisurely routine of hunting and foraging, and then one evening both the San were galvanized by excitement and they faced into the north with their little amber faces turned up to a sky that was the flawless blue of a heron's egg.

It took Centaine a few minutes to discover what had excited them, and then she saw the cloud. It groped up over the rim of the northern horizon like the finger of a gargantuan hand, and it grew as she watched it, the top of it flattened into an anvil shape, and the distant thunder growled like a hunting lion. Soon the cloud stood tall and heaven-high, burning with the colours of the sunset and lit with its own wondrous internal lightnings.

That night O'wa danced and whistled and sang the praises of the cloud spirits until at last he collapsed with exhaustion, but in the morning the thunderhead had dispersed.

However, the sky had changed from unsullied blue, and there were streaks of high mare's-tails cirrus smeared across it. The air itself seemed also to have changed. It was charged with static that made Centaine's skin prickle, and the heat was heavy and languorous, even harder to bear than the dry harsh noons had been, and the thunderheads climbed above the northern horizon and tossed their monstrous billowing heads to the sky.

Each day they grew taller and more numerous, and they massed in the north like a legion of giants and marched southward, while an enervating blanket of humid air lay upon the earth and smothered it and everything upon it.

Please let it rain, Centaine whispered each day, while the sweat snaked down her cheeks and the child weighted her womb like an ironstone boulder.

In the night O'wa danced and sang.

Spirit of Cloud, see how the earth waits for you the way that a great cow eland in heat trembles for the bull.

Come down from on high, Spirit of Cloud whom we venerate, and spill your generative fluids upon your earth wife. Mount your lover and from your seed she will bring forth new life in abundance. And when H'ani trilled and piped the chorus, Centaine cried out just as fervently.

One morning there was no sun, the clouds stretched in a solid grey mass from horizon to horizon. Low to begin with, they sank lower still, and a stupendous bolt of lightning tore from their great grey sowlike belly and clanged upon the earth so that it seemed to jump beneath their feet. A single raindrop struck Centaine in the centre of her forehead, and it was as heavy as a stone, so that she reeled back at the shock of it and cried out in astonishment.

Then the hanging clouds burst open and the rain fell from them thick as locusts. Each drop as it struck the surface of the pan rolled into a globule of mud, or made the wiry scrub branches around the edge jump and quiver as though flocks of invisible birds had alighted upon them.

The rain stung Centaine's skin, and one drop struck her in the eye and blinded her for a second. She blinked it clear and laughed to see O'wa and H'ani capering across the pan. They had thrown aside their meagre clothing and they danced naked in the rain. Each drop burst in a silver puff upon their wrinkled amber skin and they howled delightedly at the pricks of it.

Centaine ripped off her own canvas skirt, threw aside the shawl, and mother-naked stood with her arms thrown open and her face turned to the clouds. The rain thrashed her and melted her long dark hair down across her face and shoulders. She pushed it aside with both hands and opened her mouth wide.

it was as though she stood under a waterfall. The rain poured into her mouth as fast as she could swallow. The far edge of the pan disappeared behind the blue veils of falling rain, and the surface turned to yellow mud.

The rain was so cold that a rash of goose bumps ran down Centaine's forearms and her nipples darkened and hardened, but she laughed with joy and ran out to the pan to dance with the San, and the thunder sounded as though massive boulders were rolling across the roof of the sky.

The earth seemed to dissolve under the solid sheets of silver water. The pan was ankle-deep and the silky mud squelched up between Centaine's toes. The rain gave them new life and strength and they danced and sang until O'wa stopped abruptly and cocked his head to listen.

Centaine could hear nothing above the thunder and the lash of the rain, but O'wa shouted a warning. They floundered to the steep bank of the pan, slipping in the glutinous mud and the yellow waters which by now reached to their knees. From the bank Centaine heard the sound which had alarmed O'wa, a low rushing like a high wind in tall trees.

The river, O'wa pointed through the thick palisade of silver rain, the river is alive again. It came like a living thing, a monstrous frothing yellow python down the sandy river bed, and it hissed from bank to bank, carrying the bodies of drowned animals and the branches of trees in its flood. It burst into the flooded pan and raced in serried waves across the surface, breaking on the bank beneath their feet, swirling on to catch them around the legs and threatening to drag them under.

They snatched up their few possessions and waded to higher ground, clinging to each other for support. The rain clouds brought on premature night, and it was cold.

There was no chance of a fire and they huddled together for warmth and shivered miserably.

The rain fell without slackening all that night.

In the dull leaden dawn they looked across a drowned landscape, a vast shimmering take with islands of higher ground from which the water streamed, and stranded acacia trees like the backs of whales.

Will it never stop? Centaine whispered. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably, and the chill seemed to have to reached into her womb, for the infant writhed and kicked in protest.

Please let it stop now. The San suffered the cold with the fortitude they showed for all hardship. Rather than slackening, the rain seemed to increase in tempo, and hid the sorry drowned land from them behind a glassy curtain.

Then the rain stopped. There was no warning, no faltering or tapering off; one second it was falling in a solid cascade and the next it was over. The ceiling of low bruised cloud split open and peeled away like the skin from a ripe fruit, revealing the clean washed blue of the sky, and the sun burst upon them with blinding brilliance, once more stunning Centaine with the sudden contrasts of this wild continent.

Before noon, the thirsty earth had drunk down the waters that had fallen upon it. The floods sank away without trace. Only in the pan itself surface water still lay glittering sulphurous-yellow from bank to far bank.

However, the land was cleansed and vivid with colour.

The dust that had coated each bush and tree was washed away and Centaine saw greens that she had never dreamed this tan, lion-coloured land could contain. The earth, still damp, was rich with ochres and oranges and reds and the songs of the little desert larks were joyous.

They laid out their scant possessions in the sun and they steamed as they dried. O'wa could not contain himself and be danced ecstatically.

The cloud spirits have opened the road for us. They have replenished the water-holes to the east. Make ready, H'ani, my little flower of the desert: before the dawn tomorrow we will march.

Within the first day's march they entered a new country, so different that Centaine could scarcely believe it was on the same continent. Here the ancient dunes had compacted and consolidated into gentle undulations, and they now supported abundant plant life.

Stands of mopani and tall kiaat, alternating with almost impenetrable thickets of paper-bark, stood tall along the ridges of high ground where the dunes crests had weathered and flattened. Occasionally a giant silver terminalia or a monumental bac, hah soared seventy feet above the rest of the forest.

in the valleys, fields of sweet golden grasses and scattered giraffe acacias with flat tops gave the scene a park-like and cultivated aspect.

Here also, in the lowest depressions, the recent rains had been trapped in the shallow water-holes, and the land seemed to hum and seethe with life.

Through the yellow grasses fresh tender shoots of delicate green appeared. Gardens of wild flowers, daisies and arum lilies and gladioli and fifty other varieties which Centaine did not recognize, sprang up as though at a F magician's flourish, delighting her with their colours and delicate beauty, and causing her to wonder anew at Africa's prolificness. She picked the blooms and plaited them into necklaces for herself and H'ani, and the old woman preened like a bride.

Oh, I wish I had a mirror to show you how adorable you look. Centaine embraced her.

Even from the sky Africa gave of her abundance. There were flocks of quelea thick as hiving bees as they wheeled overhead, shrikes in the undergrowth with chests of purest glowing ruby, sandgrouse and francolin fat as domestic chickens, and water fowl on the brimming waterholes, wild duck and long-legged stilts and gaunt blue heron.

It's all so beautiful, Centaine exulted. Each day's journey was light and carefree after the hardships of the and western plains, and when they camped, there was the untold luxury of unlimited water and a Least of wild fruits and nuts and game from O'wa's snares and arrows.

One evening O'wa climbed high into the swollen fleshy branches of a monstrous baobab and smoked the hive that had inhabited its hollow trunk since his great-grandfather's time and beyond. He came down with a gourd full of thick waxen combs running with dark honey redolent of the perfume of the yellow acacia blossoms.

Each day they met new species of wild animals: sable antelope, black as night with long scimitar horns that swept back almost to their hind quarters, and Cape buffalo with mournful drooping heads of massively bossed horn stinking like herds of domestic cattle.

They have come down from the big river and the swamps, O'wa. explained. They follow the water, and when it dries again they will go back into the north. In the night Centaine woke to a new sound infinitely more fearsome than the yelping of the black-backed jackal or the maniacal screams and sobs of the hyena packs. It was a storm of sound that filled the darkness, rising to an impossible crescendo and then dying away in a series of deep grunts. Centaine scrambled out of her little hut and ran to H'ani.

What was that, old grandmother? It is a sound to turn the belly to water! Centaine found she was trembling and the old woman hugged her.

Even the bravest of men trembles the first time he hears the roar of the lion, she placated her. But do not fear, Nam Child, O'wa has made a charm to protect us.

The lion will find other game tonight But they crowded close to the fire all the rest of the night, feeding it with fresh logs, and it was obvious that H'ani had as little faith in her husband's magical charms as Centaine did.

The lion pride circled their camp site, keeping at the very limit of the firelight so that Centaine caught only an occasional pale flicker of movement amongst the dark, encroaching bushes, but with the dawn their dreadful chorus receded as they moved away into the east, and when O'wa showed her the huge catlike pugmarks in the soft earth, he was garrulous with relief.

Then on the ninth morning after they had left the pan of the big white place, they were approaching another water-hole through the open mopani forests when ahead of them there was a crack like a shot of cannon and they all froze.

What is it, H'ani? But she waved Centaine to silence, and now she heard the crackle of breaking undergrowth and then suddenly a ringing blast of sound clear as a trumpet call.

Quickly O'wa tested the wind as Centaine had seen him do at the beginning of every hunt, and then he led them in a wide stealthy circuit through the forest until he stopped again beneath the spreading glossy green foliage of a tall mopani tree where he laid aside his weapons and his pack.

Come! he signalled to Centaine and, swiftly as a monkey, shinned up the trunk. Hardly hampered at all by her fruitful belly, Centaine followed him into the tree and from a fork in the top branches looked down into the valley of grassland beyond and the water-hole that it contained in its shallow bottom.

Elephant! She recognized the huge grey beasts instantly. They were streaming down the far slope of the valley towards the water, striding out with their ponderous rolling gait, heads swinging so that their enormous ears flapped, and their trunks rolling and reaching reflexively as they anticipated the sweet taste of water.

There were rangy old queens with tattered ear-lobes and the knuckles of their spines sticking out of their gaunt backs, young bulls with yellow ivories, tuskless youngsters, boisterous unweaned calves running to keep up with their dams and, at their head, the herd bull strode majestically.

He stood over ten feet tall at the shoulder and he was scarred and grey, thick baggy skin hanging from his knees and bunched between his back legs. His ears were spread like the mainsail. of a tall ship, and his tusks were twice as long and thick as any of his lesser bulls.

He seemed aged and yet ageless, huge and rugged, possessed of a grandeur and mystery which seemed to Centaine to contain the very essence of this land.

Lothar De La Rey cut the spoor of the elephant herd three days after they had left the Cunene river, and he and his Ovambo trackers studied it carefully, spreading out and circling over the trodden earth like gundogs. When they assembled again, Lothar nodded at his headman.

Speak, Hendrick. The Ovarnbo was as tall as Lothar, but heavier in the shoulders. His skin was dark and smooth as molten chocolate.

A good herd, Hendrick gave his opinion, forty cows, many with calf, eight young bulls. The dark turban of the warrior was wound around his proud head, and garlands of necklaces strung with trade beads hung down on to his muscular chest, but he wore riding breeches and a bandolier of ammunition over one shoulder.

And the herd bull is so old that his pads are smooth, so old that he can no longer chew his food and his dung is coarse with bark and twigs. He walks heavily on his forelegs, his ivory weighs him down, he is a bull to follow, Hendrick said, and shifted the Mauser rifle into his right hand and hefted it in anticipation.

The spoor is windblown, Lothar pointed out quietly and scratched over by insect and quail. Three days old."They are feeding, Hendrick opened his arms, spread out, moving slowly, the calves slow them down. We will have to send the horses back, I Lothar persisted. We cannot risk them in the tsetse fly. Can we catch them on foot? Lothar unknotted his scarf and wiped his face thoughtfully. He needed that ivory. He had ridden north to the Cunene as soon as his scouts had sent him word that good rains had fallen. He knew that the new growth and surface water would lure the herds across the river out of Portuguese territory.

On foot we can make them in two days, Hendrick promised, but he was a notorious optimist and Lothar teased him.

And at each night's camp we will find ten pretty Herero girls each carrying a beerpot on her head waiting U for us.

i Hendrick threw back his head and laughed his deep growling tough. Three days then, he conceded with a chuckle, and perhaps only one Herero girl, but very beautiful and obliging. Lothar pondered the chances a moment longer.

It was a good bull, and the younger bulls would all carry mature ivory, even the cows would yield twenty pounds each, and ivory was commanding 22s 6d a pound.

He had twelve of his best men with him, though two would have to be sent back with the horses, but there were still enough riflemen to do the job. If they could come up with the herd they had a good chance of killing every animal that showed ivory.

Lothar De La Rey was flat broke. He had lost his family fortune, he had been declared a traitor and an outlaw for continuing the fight after the surrender of Colonel Franke, and there was a price on his head. Perhaps this would be his very last chance to repair his fortune. He knew the British welt enough to realize that when the war was over, they would turn their attention to administering the new territories that they had won. Soon the re would be district commissioners and officers in even the remotest areas, enforcing every detail of the law and paying special attention to the illegal hunting of ivory.

The old free-booting days were probably numbered. This could be his last hunt.

Send back the horses! he ordered. Take the spoor! Lothar wore tight hunting velskoen. His men were all tempered and hardened by long years of war, and they ran on the spoor, taking it in turns to come to the front and take the point, then dropping back to rest as another man hit the front.

They entered the fly-bett in the late afternoon, and the vicious little tsetse swarmed out of the shade of the forest to plague them, settling light-footed on their backs to drive their blood-sucking probosces deep into the flesh.

The men cut switches of green leaves and brushed the tsetse off each other's backs as they ran. By nightfall they had gained two days on the herd, and the spoor was so fresh that the ant-lions had not yet built their tiny funnelshaped traps in the crisply trodden pad marks.

Darkness stopped them. They lay on the hard earth and slept like a pack of hounds, but when the moon climbed over the tops of the mopani trees, Lothar kicked them to their feet. The slant of moonlight was in their favour, outlining the spoor with a rim of shadow, and the raw trunks of the mopani trees, from which the feeding elephant had stripped the bark, shone like mirrors to guide them through the night, and when the sun rose they lengthened their stride.

An hour after sunrise they suddenly ran out of the tsetse fly-belt. The territory of these little winged killers was sharply demarcated, the border could be crossed in a hundred paces, from swarming multitudes to complete relief. The swollen itching lumps on the back of their necks were the only souvenirs of their onslaught.

Two hours before noon, they reached a good water-hole in one of the valleys of the mopani forest. They were only hours behind the herd.

Drink quickly, Lothar ordered, and waded knee-deep into the filthy water which the bathing elephant had churned to the colour of cafe all lait. He filled his hat and poured the water over his own head. His thick, redgold locks streamed down over his face, and he snorted with pleasure. The water was acrid and bitter with the salt of the elephant urine, the beasts always emptied their bladders at the shock of cold water, but the hunters drank and refilled the water-bottles.

Quickly, Lothar chivvied them, keeping his voice low, for sound carries in the bush and the herd was very close.

Baas! Hendrick signalled him urgently, and Lothar waded to the edge of the pool, and skirted it quickly. What is it?

Wordlessly the big Ovambo pointed at the ground. The spoor was perfectly imprinted in the stiff yellow clay, and it was so fresh that it overlaid that of the elephant herd water was still seeping into the indentations.

Men! Lothar exclaimed. Men have been here since the herd left. Hendrick corrected him harshly. San, not men. The little yellow cattle-killers. The Ovambo, were herdsmen, their cattle were their treasure and their deep love. The desert dogs who cut the teats off the udders of our finest cows, the traditional revenge of the San for the atrocities committed upon them, they are only minutes ahead of us. We could catch them within the hour. The sound of gunfire would carry to the herd. Lothar shared his headman's hatred of the Bushmen. They were dangerous vermin, cattle-thieves and killers. His own great-uncle had been killed during one of the great Bushmen hunts of fifty years before, a tiny bone-tipped arrow had found the chink in his rawhide armour, and family history had recorded his death in every excruciating I detail.

Even the English with their sickly sentimentality towards the black races had realized that there was no place in this twentieth-century world for the San. The standing orders of Cecil Rhodes famous British South Africa Police contained instructions that all San and wild I dogs encountered on patrol were to be shot out of hand. I The two species were considered as one.

Lothar was tempted, torn between the pleasure of performing the public service of following and destroying the pack of San, and of mending his own fortune by following the elephant.

The ivory, he decided. No, the ivory is more important than culling a few yellow baboons Baas, here! Hendrick had moved around the edge of the pool and stopped abruptly. His tone and the alert set of his head made Lothar hurry to him, and then sit quickly on his heels, the better to examine this new set of prints.

Not San! Hendrick whispered. Too big But a woman, Lothar replied. The narrow foot and small shapely toe marks were unmistakable. A young woman. The toe marks were deeper than the heel, a springy step, a young step.

It is not possible! Hendrick sank down beside him and without touching the print traced the arched portion between ball and heel. Lothar sat back and shook his wet dangling locks again.

The black people of Africa who go barefooted from their very first step leave a distinctive flat imprint.

A wearer of shoes, Hendrick said softly.

A white woman? No, it's impossible! Lothar repeated. Not here, not travelling in the company of wild San! For the love of God, we are hundreds of miles from civilization! It is so, a young white girl, a captive of the San, Hendrick confirmed, and Lothar frowned.

The tradition of chivalry towards women of his own race was an integral part of Lothar's upbringing, one of the -pillars of his Protestant religion. Because he was a soldier and hunter, because it was part of the art of his trade, Lothar could read the sign left upon the earth as though he were actually seeing the beast or the man, or woman, who had made it. Now as he squatted over these dainty prints, an image formed in his mind. He saw a girl, fine-boned, long-legged, gracefully proportioned, but strong and proud, with a raking stride that drove her forward on the balls of her feet. She would be brave also, and determined. There was no place in this wilderness for weaklings, and clearly this girl was flourishing. As the image formed, Lothar became aware of an emptiness deep in his soul.

We must go after this woman, he said softly, to rescue her from the San. Hendrick rolled his eyes towards the sky and reached for his snuff gourd, and poured a little of the red powder into his pink palm.

The wind is against us, he waved one hand along the run of the spoor, they are travelling downwind. We will never come up with them. There are always one hundred good reasons why we should not do what you don't want to do. Lothar raked his wet hair back with his fingers and retied it with the leather thong at the nape of his neck. We will be following San, not animals. The wind is of no consequence. The San are animals.

Hendrick blocked one of his wide flat nostrils with his thumb and sucked red snuff up the other before going on. With this wind they will smell you from two miles and hear you long before you sight them."He dusted his hands and flicked the residual grains from his upper lip.

A beautiful story! Lothar scoffed. Even for you, the greatest liar in all of Ovamboland. And then, brusquely, Enough chatter, we are going after the white girl. Take the spoor.

From the high fork of the mopani tree, Centaine watched the elephant herd at the water-hole with mounting delight. once she had got over the trepidation caused by their size and monumental ugliness, she swiftly became aware of the endearing bond that seemed to unite all the members of the herd. They began to seem almost human to her.

The patriarch bull was crotchety and his arthritic joints obviously ached. They all treated him with respect, and left one side of the pool for him alone. He drank noisily, squirting the water down his throat. Then he lowered himself, groaning with pleasure, into the mud, and scooped it up in his trunk to slap it on to his dusty grey head. It ran down his cheeks, and he closed his eyes ecstatically.

On the opposite side of the pool the young bulls and cows drank and bathed, blowing mud and water out of their trunks like fire hoses, squirting themselves between the forelegs and down the flanks, lifting their heads and thrusting their trunks deep down their throats to send gallons of water hissing into their bellies. Satiated, they stood happily, trunks entwined in a loving embrace, and seemed to beam indulgently at the calves cavorting around their legs and under their bellies.

One of the smallest calves, not much bigger than a pig and just as fat, tried to wriggle under the trunk of a dead tree that had fallen into the pool and stuck fast in the mud. In comical panic it let out a squeal of alarm and terror. Every elephant in the herd reacted instantly, changing from contented indolence into raging behemoths of vengeance. They rushed back into the pool, beating the water and kicking it in a froth with their great hooves.

They think a crocodile has caught the calf, O'wa whispered.

Poor crocodile! Centaine whispered back.

The mother yanked the calf out from under the dead tree, hindfeet first, and it shot between her front legs and fastened on to one of her teats where it suckled with almost hysterical relief. The enraged herd quietened down, but with every evidence of disappointment that they had been denied the pleasure of tearing the hated crocodile into small pieces.

When the old bull finally heaved himself upright and, glistening with mud, strode away into the forest, the cows hastily rounded up their offspring, chasing them from their muddy pleasures with swinging trunks, and obediently they all trooped after the patriarch. Long after they had disappeared into the forest, Centaine could hear the crack of breaking branches and the rumble of their waterfilled bellies as they fed away southwards.

She and O'wa climbed down from the mopani grinning with pleasure.

The little ones were so naughty, Centaine told H'ani, just like human babies. We call them the big people, H'ani agreed, for they are wise and loving as the San. They went down to the edge of the water-hole and Centaine marvelled at the mountainous piles of yellow dung that the elephants had dropped. Already the clucking francolin were scratching in the steaming mounds for undigested nuts and seeds.

Anna would love that for the vegetable garden- she caught herself. I mustn't think so much of the past. She stooped to bathe her face, for even the muddy water offered relief from the rising heat, but suddenly O'wa stiffened and cocked his head, turning it towards the north, in the direction from which the elephant herd had come.

What is it, old grandfather? H'ani was instantly sensitive to his mood.

O'wa did not answer for a second, but his eyes were troubled and his lips twitched nervously.

There is something, something on the wind, a sound, a scent, I am not sure, he whispered. Then, with sudden decision, There is danger, close. We must go H'ani jumped up instantly and snatched up the satchel of egg bottles. She would never argue with her husband's intuition, it had saved them often during their lifetime together.

Nam Child, she said softly but urgently, hurry H'ani- Centaine turned to her with dismay. She was already knee-deep in the muddy pool. It is so hot, I want to-, There is danger, great danger. The two San whirled together like startled birds and flew back towards the forest refuge. Centaine knew that in seconds she would be left alone, and loneliness was still her greatest terror.

She ran from the pool, kicking spray before her, grabbed her carrying bag and stick and dressed as she ran.

O'wa circled quickly through the mopani forest, moving across the wind until it blew upon the back of his neck. The San, like the buffalo and the elephant, always fled downwind when alarmed, so that the scent of the pursuer would be carried down to them.

O'wa paused for Centaine to catch up with them. What is it, O'wa? she gasped.

Danger. Deadly danger. The agitation of both the old people was obvious, and infectious. Centaine had learned not to ask questions in a situation such as this. What must I do? Cover sign, the way I showed you, O'wa ordered her, and she remembered the patient instruction that he had given her in the art of anti-tracking, of confusing and hiding the spoor so that a pursuer would find it difficult if not impossible to follow them. It was one of the skills on which San survival depended. H'ani first, then you. O'wa was in complete command now. Follow her. Do as she does. I will come at the back and cover your mistakes. The old woman was as quick and agile as a little brown francolin. She flitted through the forest, avoiding the game paths and open ground on which their tracks would stand out clearly, picking the difficult line, ducking under thorn thickets where a pursuer would not expect them to pass, stepping on grass clumps or running along the trunks of fallen trees, changing her length of stride, hopping sideways over harder ground, employing every ruse she had learned in a long hard lifetime.

Centaine followed her, not as nimble, leaving an occasional blurred footprint, knocking a green leaf from a bush as she passed, disturbing the grass slightly. O'wa came close behind her, a broom of grass stalks in his hand to brush over the sign that Centaine left, stooping to pick up the tell-tale green leaf, delicately rearranging the bent grass stems that signposted the direction of their flight.

He guided H'ani with small chirping bird calls and whistles, and she responded instantly, turning left or right, speeding up or freezing for a few seconds so that J, O'wa could listen and sniff the breeze for the scent of the pursuit, then plunging forward again at his signal.

Suddenly another open glade spread before them, half a mile wide, studded with a few tall flat-topped giraffe acacia; beyond it rose the low ridge, heavily forested with paper-bark trees and dense wild ebony thickets for which O'wa was heading.

He knew that the ridge was composed of rock-hard calcrete, lumpy and broken, and he knew also that no human being could follow him over that ground. Once they reached it, they were safe, but the glade lay before them, and if they were caught there in the open, they would be easy prey, especially if their pursuers were armed with the smoke that kills from far off.

He wasted a few precious seconds to sniff at the air. It was hard to judge the distance of that faint offensive taint upon the light breeze, the stink of carbolic soap and snuff, of unwashed woollen clothing and socks, of the rancid cattle fat with which the Ovambo anointed their bodies, but he knew that he had to risk the open ground.

His most skilful anti-tracking could not cover all the fil signs that Nam Child had left over the soft sandy earth.

p t His efforts to do so would merely impede the pursuit, but he knew that the bushcraft of the Ovambo was almost equal to his own. Only on the hard calcrete ridge could he be certain of losing them. He whistled, the call of a crimson -breasted shrike, and obediently H'ani started out into the open glade, scuttling through the short yellow grass.

Run, little bird, O'wa called softly. If they catch us in the open, we are dead.

They have smelled us, Hendrick looked back at Lothar.

See how they are covering sign. At the forest edge it seemed as though their quarry had turned into birds and taken to the air. All trace of them seemed to disappear. Brusquely Hendrick signalled to the other Ovarnbo hunters, and they spread out swiftly.

Throwing a wide net, they moved forward in line. A man on the right flank whistled softly and then waved under handed, indicating a new direction.

They have turned down the wind, Hendrick mur inured to Lothar, who was ten paces out on his flank. I should have guessed it. The net of trackers wheeled on to the line, and moved forward. A man whistled on the left, and confirmed the line with that graceful underhand wave; they speeded up, breaking into a trot.

just ahead Lothar noticed a faint colour difference on the seemingly undisturbed earth, a tiny patch of lighter sand no bigger than a man's foot, and he stooped to examine it. A footprint had been carefully brushed over and obliterated. Lothar whistled softly, and waved them forward on the line.

Now do you believe the San can smell like an elephant? Hendrick asked him as they jogged on.

I believe only what I see, Lothar grinned. When I see a Bushman sniffing the ground, then I will believe. Hendrick chuckled, but his eyes were cold and humourless.

They will have arrows, he said.

Do not let them get close, Lothar replied. Shoot them down the moment you see them, but be careful of the white woman. I will kill the man who harms her. Pass it on to the others. Lothar's order was called softly down the line.

Shoot the San, but take great care of the white woman. Twice they lost the spoor. They had to back up to the last marked sign, cast around it, and then move off again on the new line. The San were winning time and distance with every check, and Lothar fretted.

They are getting away from us, he called to Hendrick.

I am going to run ahead on this line, you follow on the spoor, in case they jink again. Be careful! Hendrick shouted after him. They may lie in ambush. Watch out for the arrows. Lothar ignored the warning and raced through the forest, no longer tracking the sign, but taking the chance that it was straight ahead, hoping to startle the Bushmen and force them to show themselves, or to push them so that they would abandon their captive. He took no hard notice of the hooked thorns that ripped at his clothing.

He ducked under the low mopani branches and hurdled fallen logs, running at the very peak of his speed.

Suddenly he burst from the forest into an open glade and he pulled up, his chest heaving for breath, sweat running into his eyes and soaking the back of his shirt between the shoulder-blades.

On the far side of the glade below the low forested ridge he saw movement, small black specks above the tops of the swaying yellow grass, and he turned back to the nearest tree and scrambled into the first fork for a better view.

Gasping wildly for breath, he fumbled the small brass telescope out of his hunting bag and pulled it to full extension. His hands were shaking, so it was difficult to focus the telescope, but be swept the far edge of the open glade.

Three human shapes appeared in the round field of the lens. They were in Indian file, heading directly away from him, almost at the palisade formed by the trunks of the paper-bark trees. Only their heads and shoulders showed above the grass, bobbing up and down as they ran. One was taller than the other two.

He watched them for seconds only before they reached the tree line, and two of them disappeared instantly, but the tallest figure paused, stepped up on to a fallen log and looked back across the glade towards Lothar.

It was a girl. Her long dark hair was divided into two thick braids that hung on to her shoulders. Through the telescope Lothar could see her expression, fearful, yet defiant. The lines of her chin and brow were aristocractic, and her mouth was full and firm, dark eyes proud and bright, her skin stained to deep honey-gold, so for an instant he thought she might be a mulatto. As he watched she shifted the bag she carried from one shoulder to the other, and the coarse material that clothed her upper body fell open for an instant.

Lothar saw a flash of pale smooth skin, untouched by the sun, the form of a full young breast, rosy tipped and delicately shaped, and he felt a weakness in his legs that was not from hard running. His breath stopped for an instant, and then roared in his own ears as he panted to fill his lungs.

The girl turned her head away from him, offering him a profile, and in that instant Lothar knew that he had never seen a woman more appealing. Everything in him yearned towards her. She turned her back to him and sprang lithely out of the field of the lens, and disappeared.

The branches of the edge of the forest trembled for a few seconds after she was gone.

Lothar felt like a man blind from birth, who for a fleeting instant had been shown the miracle of sight, only to be plunged back into darkness again. He stared after the girl, his feeling of deprivation so appalling that he could not move for many seconds, and then he leapt from the tree, rolling to his knees, breaking his fall, and sprang to his feet again.

He whistled -sharply and heard his call answered by Hendrick far behind him in the mopani, but he did not wait for his men to come up. He crossed the glade at a full run, but his feet seemed weighted with lead. He reached the spot where the girl had stopped to look back towards him, and found the tree stump on to which she had climbed. The marks of her bare feet that she had left in the soft earth as she jumped down from the stump were deep and clear, but a few paces farther she had reached the calcrete of the ridge. It was hard as marble, rough and broken, and Lothar knew that it would hold no sign. He did not waste a moment searching for it, but forced his way up through the thick bush to the crest of the ridge, hoping for another sighting from there.

The forest hemmed him in, and even when he climbed into the top branches of a solitary boabab, he looked down on the unbroken roof of the forest that spread away, grey and forbidding, to the horizon.

He climbed down and wearily retraced his steps to the edge of the glade. His Ovarnbos were waiting for him there.

We have lost them on the hard ground, Hendrick greeted him. Cast ahead, we must find them, Lothar ordered. I have tried already, the spoor is closed We cannot give up. We will work at it, I will not let them go. You saw them, Hendrick said softly, watching his master's face. Yes. It was a white girl, Hendrick insisted. You saw the girl, did you not? We cannot leave her here in the desert. Lothar looked away. He did not want Hendrick to see into the empty place in his soul. We must find her. We will try again, Hendrick agreed, and then with a sly telling grin, She was beautiful, this girl? Yes, Lothar whispered softly, still not looking at him. She was beautiful. He shook himself, as though waking from a dream, and the line of his jaw hardened.

Get your men on to the ridge, he ordered.

They worked over it like a pack of hunting dogs, quartering every inch of the adamant yellow rock, stooping over it and moving in a slow painstaking line, but they found only one further mark of the passage of the San and the girl.

In one of the overhanging branches of a paper-bark tree, near the crest of the ridge, just at the level of Lothar's shoulder, a lock of human hair was caught, torn from the girl's scalp as she ducked beneath the branch. It was curly and springy, as long as his forearm, and it glistened in the sunlight like black silk. Lothar wound it carefully around his finger, and then when none of his men was watchin& he opened the locket that hung around his neck on a golden chain. In the recess was a miniature of his mother.

He placed the curl of hair over it and snapped the lid of the locket closed.

Lothar kept them hunting for signs until it was dark, and in the morning he started them again as soon as they could see the ground at their feet. He split them into two teams. Hendrick took one team along the eastern side of the ridge, and Lothar worked the western extremity where the calcrete merged into the Kalahari sands, trying to discover the spot at which their quarry had left the ridge again.

E Four days later they had still not intersected the spoor, and two of the Ovarnbo had deserted. They slipped away during the night, taking their rifles with them.

We will lose the rest of them, Hendrick warned him ; : quietly. They are saying that this is a madness. They cannot understand it. Already we have lost the elephant herd, and there is no profit in this business any longer.

The spoor is dead. The San and the woman have slipped away. You will not find them now. Hendrick was right, it had become an obsession. A

single glimpse of a woman's face had driven him mad.

Lothar sighed, and slowly turned away from the ridge on which the pursuit had foundered.

Very well. He raised his voice so that the rest of his men, who had been trailing disconsolately, could hear him. Drop the spoor. It is dead. We are going back. The effect upon them was miraculous. Their step quickened and their expressions sparkled to life again.

Lothar remained on the ridge as the gang started back down the slope. He stared out over the forest towards the east, towards the mysterious interior where few white men had ventured, and he fingered the locket at his throat.

Where did you go? Was it that way, deeper into the Kalahari? Why didn't you wait for me, why did you run? There were no answers, and he dropped the locket back into the front of his shirt. If I ever cut your spoor again, you won't lose me so easily, my pretty. Next time I'll follow you to the ends of the earth, he whispered, and turned back down the slope.

O`wa jinked back and followed the ridge towards the south, keeping just below the crest, driving the women as hard as they could run heavily laden over the rough footing. He would not allow them to rest, although Centaine was beginning to tire badly, and pleaded with him over her shoulder.

In the middle of the afternoon he allowed them to drop their satchels and sprawl on the rocky slope while he scurried on down to reconnoitre the contact line of the sands and the calcrete intrusion for a point at which to make the crossover. Halfway down he paused and sniffed; picking up the faint stench of carrion, he turned aside and found the carcass of an old zebra stallion. Reading the sign, O'wa saw that hunting lions had caught him as he crossed the ridge and dragged him down. The kill was weeks old, the tatters of skin and flesh had dried hard and the bones were scattered amongst the rocks.

O'wa searched quickly and found all four of the zebra's feet intact. The hyena had not yet crunched them to splinters. With the clasp knife he prised the horny sheath of the actual hooves from the bony mass of the metatarsals, and hurried back to fetch the women. He led them the soft ground, and knelt in front of down to the edge of Centaine.

I will take Nam Child off, and then come back for you, he told H'ani as he bound the hoof sheaths to Centaine's feet with sansevieria twine.

We must hurry, old grandfather, they could be close behind us. H'ani sniffed the light breeze anxiously, and cocked her head towards each small forest sound.

Who are they? Centaine had recovered not only her breath, but her curiosity and reason. Who is chasing us?

I haven't seen or heard a thing. Are they people like me, O'wa, are they my people? Swiftly H'ani cut in before O'wa could reply. They are black men. Big black men from the north, not your people. Although she and O'wa had both seen the white man at the edge of the glade when they looked back from the ridge, they had reached agreement in a few words that they would keep Nam Child with them.

f Are you sure, H'ani? Centaine teetered on the zebra hooves, like a little girl in her first high-heeled shoes. They were not pale-skinned like me? The dreadful possi- Ilk bility that she was fleeing from her rescuers had suddenly occurred to her.

No! No! H'ani fluttered her hands in extreme agitation. The child was so close to birth, to witness that moment was the last thing in her life that she still cared about. Not pale-skinned like you. She thought of the most horrific being in San mythology. They are big black giants who eat human flesh. Cannibals! Centaine was shocked.

Yes! Yes! That is why they pursue us. They will cut the child from your womb and-, Let's go, O'wa! Centaine gasped. Hurry! Hurry!"

O'wa, with the other pair of hooves strapped to his own feet, guided Centaine away from the ridge, walking behind her and creating the illusion of a zebra having left the rocky ground and wandered away into the forest.

A mile from the ridge he hid Centaine in a clump of thorny scrub, removed the hooves from her feet, reversed the pair upon his own feet and set off back to fetch H'ani.

The two San, each of them wearing hoof sandals, tracked back along the same trail and when they reached Centaine's hiding-place, discarded the hooves and all three of them fled into the east.

O'wa kept them going all that night, and in the dawn while the women slept exhausted, he circled back on their trail and guarded it against the possibility that the pursuers had not been deceived by his ruse with the zebra hooves. Although he could discover no evidence of pursuit, for three more days and nights he force-marched, allowing no cooking fires, and used every natural feature to anti-track and hide their trail.