At the airport her crew were packing their equipment into the Dove under David Abrahams' supervision when Shasa and Kitty drove up in the second company car, and Kitty jumped out and went to David.
'How are you going to work it, Davie?" she asked, and he looked puzzled.
'I don't understand the question." 'You'll have to fake the flight plan, won't you?" Kitty insisted.
Still mystified, David glanced at Shasa. Shasa shrugged and Kitty became exasperated.
'You know very well what I mean. How are you going to cover the fact that we are going into the Sperrgebiet without permits?" 'Without permits?" David echoed, and fished a handful of documents out of the zip pocket of his leather flying-jacket. 'Here are the permits. They were issued a week ago - all kosher and correct." Kitty wheeled and glared speechlessly at Shasa, but he refused to meet her eyes and instead ambled off to make his walk-around check of the Mosquito.
They didn't speak to each other again until Shasa had the Mosquito at twenty thousand feet, flying straight and level, then Kitty said into his earphones, 'You son of a bitch." Her voice shook with fury.
'Kitty, my darling." He turned and smiled at her over the oxygen mask, his single eye glinting happily. 'We both got what we wanted, and had a lot of fun in the process. What are you so mad about?" She turned her face away and stared down at the magnificent lioncoloured mountains of the Kharna's Hochtland. He left her to sulk.
Some minutes later he heard an unusual stuttering sound in his headset, and he frowned and leaned forward to adjust the radio.
Then, from the corner of his eye he saw that Kitty was hunched up in the seat shaking uncontrollably and that the stuttering sound was coming from her.
He touched her shoulder and she turned her face to him, it was swollen and crimson with suppressed laughter and tears of mirth were squeezing out of the corners of her eyes with the pressure. She couldn't hold it any longer, and she let out a snort.
'You crafty bastard,' she sobbed. 'Oh, you tricky monster--' and then she became incoherent as laughter overwhelmed her.
A long time later she wiped away her tears. 'We are going to get on just fine together, you and me,' she declared. 'Our minds work the same way." 'Our bodies don't do too badly either,' he pointed out, and she unclipped her oxygen mask and leaned across to offer him her mouth again. Her tongue was sinuous and slippery as an eel.
Their time in the desert together passed too swiftly for Shasa, for since they had become lovers he found her a constant joy to be with.
Her quick and curious mind stimulated his own, and through her observant eyes he saw old familiar things afresh.
Together they watched and filmed the elephantine yellow caterpillar tractors ripping the elevated terraces that had once been the ocean bed. He explained to Kitty how in the time when the crust of the earth was soft and the molten magma still burst through to the surface, the diamonds, conceived at great depth and heat and pressure, were carried up with this sulphurous outpouring.
In the endless rains of those ancient times the great rivers scoured the earth, running down to the sea, washing the diamonds down with them, until they collected in the pockets and irregularities of the seabed closest to the river mouth. As the emerging continent shrugged and shifted, so the old seabed was lifted above the surface.
The rivers had long ago dried up or been diverted, and sediment covered the elevated terraces, concealing the diamond-bearing pockets. It had taken the genius of Twenty-man-Jones to work out the old river courses. Using aerial photography and an inherent sixth sense, he had pinpointed the ancient terraces.
Kitty and her team filmed the process by which the sand and rubble churned up by the dozer blades was screened and sieved, and finally dry-blown with great multi-bladed fans, until only the precious stones - one part in tens of millions - remained.
In the desert nights the mine hutments, lacking air-conditioning, were too hot for sleep. Shasa made a nest of blankets out amongst the dunes, and with the faint peppery smell of the desert in their nostrils, they made love under a blaze of stars.
On their last day Shasa commandeered one of the company jeeps and they drove out into a land of red dunes, the highest in all the world, sculptured by the incessant winds off the cold Benguela Current, their ridges crested like living reptiles as they writhed high against the pale desert sky.
Shasa pointed out to Kitty a hrd of gemsbok, each antelope large as a pony, but with a marvellously patterned face mask of black and white and slender horns, straight and long as they were tall, that were the original unicorn of the fable. They were beautiful beasts, so adapted to their harsh country that they need never drink from surface water, but could survive only on the moisture they obtained from the silvery sun-scorched grasses. They watched them dissolve magically into the heat mirage, turning to squirming black tadpoles on the horizon before they disappeared.
'I was born here. Somewhere in these deserts,' Shasa told her as they stood hand in hand on the crest of one of the dunes and looked down a thousand feet to where they had left the jeep in the gut of the sand mountains.
He told her how Centaine had carried him in her womb through this terrible terrain, lost and abandoned, with only two little Bushmen as her guides and companions, and how the Bushwoman, for whom the H'am Mine was named, acted as midwife at his birth and named him Shasa - 'Good Water' - after the most precious substance in her world.
The beauty and the grandeur affected them both so they drew close together in the solitude, and by the end of that day Shasa was sure that he truly loved her and that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
Together they watched the sun sink towards the red dunes and the sky turned to a screen of hot hammered bronze, dented with flecks of blue cloud as though by blows from a celestial blacksmith's hammer. As the sky cooled, the colours chameleoned into puce and orange and lofty purples until the sun sank behind the dunes - and at the instant it disappeared, a miracle occurred.
They both gasped in wonder as in a silent explosion the entire heavens flared into electric green. It lasted only as long as they held their breath, but in that time the sky was as green as the ocean depths or the ice in the gaping cracks of a high mountain glacier.
Then it faded swiftly into the drab gun-metal of dusk, and Kitty turned to him with a silent question in her eyes.
'We saw it together,' Shasa said softly. 'The Bushmen call it the Green Python. A man can live a lifetime in the desert without seeing it. I have never witnessed it, not until this moment." 'What does it mean.9' Kitty asked.
'The Bushmen say it is the most fortuitous of all good omens." He reached out and took her hand. 'They say that those who see the Green Python will be specially blessed - and we saw it together." In the fading light they went down the slip face of the dune to where Shasa had parked the jeep. They sank almost knee-deep in the fluffy sun-warm sand, and laughing they clung to each other for support.
When they reached the jeep, Shasa took her by the shoulders, turned her to face him and told her, 'I don't want it to end, Kitty.
Come with me. Marry me. I'll give you everything that life has to offer." She threw back her head to laugh in his face. 'Don't be daft, Shasa Courtney. What I want from life isn't yours to give,' she told him. 'This was fun, but it wasn't reality. We can be good friends for as long as you want, but our feet are set on different paths, and we aren't going in the same direction." The next day when they landed at Windhoek airport, a telegram addressed to her was pinned to the board in the crew room. Kitty read it swiftly. When she looked up she wasn't seeing Shasa any longer.