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evening.”
    “Yes, everything goes into the lane,” Gareth said.
    “They aren’t wasteful,” Nan said, in a voice made light. “Every bit of rag they can get they make something with. They make shifts out of maize sacks. They will ask you for your rags and they are so grateful—”
    “Hallo! Nan, don’t look on the right! Dead beast.” Gareth was peremptory.
    Nan did as she was told. The men looked. On the bank was the corpse of a heifer, fresh. Dogs or jackals had been at work. There was movement in the brush adjacent.
    “Third one this trip,” Tom said. “This drought is red hell.”
    Gareth nodded. He related something that Hartogs, who was a great hunter, had told him. Animals were being driven mad with thirst and were fighting over carrion. There was some zoological protocol between vultures and jackals that was breaking down. The jackals were supposed to withdraw when the birds came, but lately they were staying and fighting.Hartogs had witnessed a magnificent fight. Gareth described it until Nan asked him to stop.
    Nan said to Tess, but projecting for the benefit of the front, “Truly, are we so superior as we think? I wonder a little. When we first moved in at the mine, we did something at the house so stupid I am still in pain. There were two pawpaw trees growing side by side by the house, one thriving with nice big pawpaws on it and the other sick-looking and leafless—dead-looking. Well, we thought it was plain what we should do: take down the dead tree. So we hauled and pushed on the trunk of the poor tree and strained and pulled it over—uprooted it, Gareth and myself. It was his idea: we must just straight off do this, get it over. Then, with the crash, the servants come out. They had funny looks on. Dineo said, so quietly, ‘Oh, Mma, you have killed the male.’ We didn’t understand. It seems the pawpaw grow in pairs, couples, male and female. The male tree looks like a phallus—no foliage to it, really. The female needs the male in order to bear. They take years to reach the height ours had. Then the female died. The staff had been eating pawpaws from our tree for years. It was a humiliation.”
    “Bit ancient times by now, isn’t it?” Gareth said angrily.
    “So sorry,” Nan said.
    They saw a woman standing at the edge of a strip of cultivated land, a mealie patch. A baby was bound to her back with a blanket.
    Nan resumed, in the same projecting voice, “And these blankets, let me just mention. These blankets they tie their children to them with. One sees the babies in the hot season and they are sweating and drenched. And I know from the sisters that quite a lot of them get pneumonia and die of it, when they shouldn’t. Why, do you think? I say because of acrylics. That’s all they can get nowadays. The acrylics don’tbreathe. Of course, in the old times they used skins, or if they bought blankets they were wool. But we bring them marvelous cheap acrylics, make them very cheap and drive out the wool, and their children are perishing. Try to buy a wool blanket today at any price in this part of the world.”
    Gareth half faced the back. “Might I ask where you have the least proof of that? You don’t know a bloody thing about it. We can’t set a foot right if we’re white, can we? Regular litany with you, Nan. You’re becoming tiresome!”
    “Could you possibly just carry on driving and not overturning? Let the women talk, Gareth. No, I have no proof, sorry. Now watch him start racing.”
    Tom and Gareth began talking about crime. They agreed that the situation was getting out of hand.
    Tom said, “You know, they have some of those road-contract chaps billeted in the Shangule Hotel to this day, the housing they promised is still not ready. Well, I talked to one of them. Well, you know how the hotel is, just by the railroad station. Train comes in twelve at night and stops for five minutes. So what happens? Every night at twelve—
pum pum pum
, you have these villains