recognition as Lothar stooped over him and had probably already lost his sight. He was breathing with extreme difficulty, fighting wildly for each breath as the poison paralysed his lungs.
Lothar touched his forehead and the skin was cold and clammy as that of a reptile. Lothar knew that Hendrick sions and the others were watching him. On many occa they had seen him dress a bullet wound, set a broken leg, draw a rotten aching tooth, and perform all manner of minor surgery. They were waiting for him to do something for the dying man, and their expectations and his own helplessness infuriated Lothar.
Suddenly Lippe uttered a strangled cry and began to shake like an epileptic, his single open eye rolled back into his skull, showing the yellow blood-shot white, and his body arched under the blanket.
Convulsions, said Lothar, like a mamba bite. It won't be long now. The dying man bit down, grinding his teeth together, and his swollen protruding tongue was caught between them. He chewed -on his tongue, mincing it to ribbons while Lothar tried desperately and futilely to prise his jaws open, and the blood poured down the Hottentot's own throat into his semi-paralysed lungs and he choked and moaned through his locked jaws.
His body arched in another rigid convulsion, and there was a spluttering explosion beneath the blanket as his wracked body voided itself. The sweet fecal stench was nauseating in the heat. It was a long-drawn-out and messy death, and when it was over at last, it left those hardened men shaken and morose.
They scraped a shallow grave and rolled Vuil Lippe's corpse, still in the soiled grey blanket, into it. Then they hastily covered it, as though to be rid of their own loathing and horror.
One of them built a small fire of brush twigs, and brewed a canteen of coffee. Lothar fetched the half-bottle of Cape brandy from his saddle-bag. As they passed it from hand to hand, they avoided looking at where the Bushman lay curled naked in the sand.
They drank the coffee in silence, squatting in a circle, and then Vark Jan, the Khoisan Hottentot who spoke the San language, flicked his coffee grounds on to the fire and stood up.
He crossed to where the San lay and picked him up by his bound wrists, forcing his arms high behind him as they bore his full weight. He carried him back to the fire and picked out a burning twig. Still holding the San dangling from one hand, he touched the naked glans of his penis with the glowing tip of the twig. The San gasped and wriggled wildly and a blister formed miraculously on the skin of his genitals. It looked like a soft silver slug.
The men around the fire laughed, and in their laughter was the sound of their loathing and their terror of the death by poison, and their sorrow for their companion, of their craving for vengeance and the sadistic need to inflict pain and humiliation the worst that they could devise.
Lothar felt himself shaken by the quality of that laughter, felt the insecure foundations of his humanity totter, and the same animal passions arise in him. With a supreme effort he forced them back. He rose to his feet.
He knew he could not prevent what was about to happen, just as you cannot drive hungry lions from their fresh kill. They would turn on him if he tried.
He averted his eyes from the Bushman's face, from those wild haunted eyes. It was clear that he knew that death awaited him, but even he could not guess at the manner of it. Instead Lothar looked at the faces of his own men, and he felt sickened and soiled by what he saw.
Their features seemed distorted as though seen through a poorly glazed window, thickened and smeared with lust.
He thought that after the Bushman had been mounted by each of them in turn, ravished as though he were a woman, he would probably welcome what awaited him at the very end.
So. Lothar tried to keep his expression neutral, but his voice was hoarse with disgust. I am returning to the wagons now. The San is yours, but I must know if he has seen or has heard of the white girl. He must answer that one question. That is all. Lothar went to his horse and mounted. He rode away towards the wagons without looking back. just once, far behind, he heard a cry of such outrage and agony that it made his skin prickle, but then it was muted and lost on the moan of the desert wind.
Much later when his men rode up to the wagons, Lothar was lying under the side awning of his living wagon, reading his faithful old copy of Goethe by the light of a hurricane lantern, stained and battered, it had sustained him a hundred times before when the substance of his being had been drawn thin.
The laughter of his men as they dismounted and unsaddled had a fat, satisfied sound, like that of men who had well feasted and drunk, and were replete. Swart Hendrick came to where he lay, swaggering as though he had taken wine, and the front of his breeches was speckled with black drops of dried blood.
The San had not seen a white woman, but there was something strange and unexplained that he had heard whispered at the fire when they met other San in the desert; a tale of a woman and a child from a strange land
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where the sun never shines, who lived with two old people of the San. Lothar came up on his elbow. He remembered the two little Bushmen he had seen with the girl. Where? Did he say where? he demanded eagerly. There is a place, deep in the Kalahari, that is sacred to all the San. He gave us the direction-'Where, Hendrick, damn you.
Where? A long journey, fifteen days of their travel.'What is this place? How will we know it?
That, Hendrick admitted sadly, he did not say. His will to stay alive was not as great as we thought it might be. He died before he could tell us. Tomorrow we will turn in that direction, Lothar ordered.
There are the other San that we lost today. With fresh horses we might catch them before sundown tomorrow.
They have women with them- No! Lothar snarled at him. We go on towards this sacred place in the wilderness.
When the great bald mountain rose abruptly out of the plain, Lothar believed at first that it must be some trick of the desert light.
He knew of no description in the folklore or verbal history of the desert tribes to warn that the existence of such a place was possible. The only white men who had travelled this country, Livingstone and Oswell on their route to the discovery of Lake Ngarni, and Anderson and Galton on their hunting forays, had made no mention of such a mountain in their writing.
