And if I am not pleased with him? Garry asked uncertainly. Kali was the Swahili word for bad or wicked, and it inspired no great confidence.
Oh, the sergeant said airily, then don't bother to bring him back. just bury him where nobody will find him. Kali Piet's attitude changed miraculously.
Good master, he whined in Afrikaans, I know every tree, every rock, every grain of sand. I will be your dog. Anna was waiting for Garry, already seated in the rear seat of the T model.
What took you so long? she demanded. My baby has been out there in the wilderness alone for sixteen days now! Corporal, Garry handed Kali Piet into the care and keeping of the senior NCO. If he tries to escape, Garry tried unconvincingly to look jeeringly sadistic, shoot him! As the last whitewashed red-tiled buildings fell away behind them, Garry's driver belched softly and retasted the beer with a dreamy smile.
Enjoy it, Garry warned him, it will be a long trek to the next tankard.
The track ran along the edge of the beach, while at their left hand the green surf tipped with ostrich feathers of spume pounded the smooth yellow sands, and before them stretched that dismal featureless littoral, shrouded in a haze of sea fret.
The track was used by kelp gatherers who collected the cast-up seaweed for fertilizer, but as they followed it northwards, so it became progressively less defined until it petered out altogether.
What is ahead? Garry demanded of Kali Piet, who had been led forward from the rear vehicle.
Nothing, said Kali Piet, and never had Garry sensed in a common-place word such menace.
We will make our own road from here on, Garry told them with a confidence he did not feel, and the next forty miles took four days to cover.
There were ancient water courses, dry for a hundred years perhaps, but with steep sides and their bottoms strewn with boulders like cannon balls. There were treacherous flats on which the vehicles sank unexpectedly to their axles in soft sand and had to be manhandled through. There was broken ground where one of the lorries toppled over on its side and another broke a rear axle and had to be abandoned, together with a pile of luggage which they had discovered was superfluous, tents and camp chairs, tables and an enamel bath, boxes of trade goods to bribe savage chieftains, cases of tea and tinned butter and all the other equipment which had seemed essential when they were shopping in Windhoek.
The abbreviated and lightened convoy struggled northwards.
In the noonday heat the water boiled in the radiators, and they drove with plumes of white steam spurting from the safety valves, and they were forced to halt every half hour to allow the engines to cool. in other places there were fields of black stone, sharp as obsidian knives, which slashed through the thin casing of their tyres. In one day Garry counted fifteen halts to change wheels, and at night the stink of rubber solution hung over the bivouac as exhausted men sat up until midnight repairing the ruined inner tubes by the light of hurricane lanterns.
On the fifth day they camped with the seared bare peak of the Brandberg, the Burned Mountain, rising out of the purple evening mist ahead of them, and in the morning Kali Piet was gone.
He had taken a rifle and fifty rounds of ammunition, a blanket and five water-bottles, and as a final touch, the gold hunter watch and the coin case with twenty gold sovereigns in it that Garry had placed carefully beside his blanket roll the previous evening.
Furiously, threatening to shoot him on sight, Garry led a punitive expedition after him in the T model. However, Kali Piet had chosen his moment, and less than a mile beyond the camp he had entered an area of broken hills and sheer valleys where no vehicle could follow him.
Let him go, Anna ordered. We are safer without him, and it's twenty days since my darling, she broke off. We must go forward, Miinheer, nothing must stand in our way. Nothing. Each day now the going became more difficult, and their progress slower, more frustrating.
At last, facing another barrier of rock that rose out of the sea like the crest on the back of a dinosaur and ran inland, jagged and glittering in the sunlight, Garry felt suddenly physically exhausted.
This is madness, he muttered to himself as he stood on the cab of one of the trucks, shading his eyes against the flat blinding glare and trying to spy out a way through this high impenetrable wall. The men have had enough. They were standing in dispirited little groups beside the dusty, battered trucks. It's almost a month, and nobody could have survived out here that long, even if they had been able to get ashore. The stump of Garry's missing leg ached and every muscle in his back was bruised, every vertebra in his spine felt crushed by the vicious jolting over rough ground. We'll have to turn back! He clambered down off the cab, moving stiffly as an old man, and limped forward to where Anna stood beside the Ford at the head of the column.
Mevrou, he began, and she turned to him and laid a big red hand on his arm.
Mijnheer - Her voice was low, and when she smiled at him Garry's protests stilled, and he thought for the first time that except for the redness of her face and the forbidding frown lines, she was a handsome woman. The line of her jaw was powerful and determined, her teeth were white and even, and there was a gentleness in her eyes that he had never noticed before.
'Mijnheer, I have been standing here thinking that there are few men who would have brought us this far. Without you we would have failed. She squeezed his arm. Of course I knew that you were wise, that you had written many books, but now I know also that you are strong and determined, and that you are a man who allows nothing to stand in your way. She squeezed his arm again. Her hand was warm and strong. Garry found that he was enjoying her touch. He straightened his shoulders, and tipped his slouch hat forward at a debonair angle. His back was not quite so painful. Anna smiled again.
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?
