Enchanted by everything within view, from the pink-frilled clouds in the eastern sky to the sombre buttress of Paarl Rock, two thousand feet below, Kathy sighed her pleasure.
"But it's wonderful! Why do we live in towns?"
"I don't," answered Tim, with a touch of pride.
"All right, sailor. . . ." She gestured through the magnificent arc which lay below their platform. "Is it all going to be as good as this?"
"Every bit. Right up till midnight." He suddenly added: "Cinderella."
She looked at him, and inclined her head. There were things between them already, new things, things apart from the ship and the crowds they lived in. She did not care; if it were going to be that sort of day—the first for many years—then she did not want to change it. She said: "Right now, Cinderella is cold," and he took her arm and led her back to the car. The tone was being set, thus early, thus happily; it might falter into discord when midnight struck, but that mattered not at all at 6 a.m.
He drove on, down a winding road which followed a deep-cut river bed, while she warmed to the day, and watched him driving, and listened to him talking, and enjoyed it all. Away from the ship, away from other people, he was a different person; he had her in his charge now, for the first time, and he seemed to have grown up suddenly, as if only a man could deserve this honour. He talked of everything—about his job, his hopes, the people on board, the way a ship was run at sea, the way a sailor was treated ashore; and she listened, and grew interested, and presently found herself joining in. She had not talked like this for years; it was innocent and intriguing at the same time, a tremendous contrast with every aspect of the past. Of course, he was her contemporary. Perhaps she had been searching for a contemporary, even longing for one.
The plunging mountain road gave way to a broad plain, and long vistas of fruit trees, and a straggling town called Worcester. Kathy proclaimed that she was hungry, and indeed she was; they stopped at a small hotel where, although it was barely half past seven, everyone was already astir, and the rocking-chairs on the stoep had a dozen slow-talking customers. Apparently South Africans rose early, to greet their beautiful dry sunshine. In the hotel lobby, furnished in musty yellow-wood, smelling already of coffee and something savoury which presently turned out to be the breakfast steaks, she said:
"This is going to be fun. Order me a big breakfast. Have you any money?"
"I have twelve pounds," he said, with satisfaction.
"Heavens! Lend me a penny."
They both burst out laughing, the sort of laughter from which everything good can stem, a guarantee that nothing could go wrong. Later, in the dining-room, they continued this mood of shared nonsense, so that even the old waiter, and the grumpy "regulars" who stamped in, wordless, and bulldozed their way through mealie-porridge, and steaks crowned with fried eggs, topped off with mugs of beer, grew brighter as they listened to the laughter and eavesdropped on the foolish jokes. At one point, Kathy, catching sight of herself in the blotched, fly-specked mirror, said: "We've no right to be so cheerful, after two hours' sleep." But she was wrong, and she knew it. Today, for some reason which they would learn as they went along, they had a cast-iron option on happiness.
"Now we've really got to drive, instead of dawdling," announced Tim, when they were outside again in the morning sunshine, and surveying the main street of Worcester with disbelieving eyes, as if they had newly landed on the moon. "It's at least another hundred miles before we come to the best part of the Karroo, the part I want you to see."
"What does Karroo mean, exactly?" she asked, as she got into the car.
"It's a Hottentot word—no water, waterless," he answered— and those were the last words he spoke for many miles. The road was excellent, and he drove fast and with great concentration, up the rising pass of the Hex River Valley, past sleepy, sun-baked towns with outlandish Afrikaans names—De Dooms, Touws Rivier, Matjesfontein—and then across a huge level plain where the road stretched like a straight black ribbon ahead, and the landscape on either side was a lonely wilderness. They covered a hundred miles in under two hours, and slipped downhill through Laingsburg, and out into the deserted tableland again. There, driving past a big outcrop of rock, its top weathered to the baldness of a thousand years, he let their speed fall away, and relaxed, and said:
"This is the beginning of it."
It was arid, austere, featureless, and very beautiful. They could see, in any direction, for fifty or sixty miles—miles of brown-baked earth and stony wastes which, close to, were discovered to be living after all, carpeted with millions of tiny flowers, green-brown cactus, pink and yellow protea, succulents seeming to grow out of the bare rock, thorny stunted bush which thrived miraculously on nothing. Tim commented: "They say this is the oldest part of Africa—perhaps the oldest part of the world," and though she did not really see how one part of Africa could be older than another, she accepted the fact. It had to be. . . . The desert which was no desert stretched as far as the eye could reach; here and there, close to the road or on the far horizon, were conical ridges and hill-tops, their outlines layered by a million years of the relentless erosion of wind and sun and rain, starkly sculptured against the pale sky.
The light was wonderful—clear as blue water, transparently bright; and though it was very hot, the heat was dry, and the shimmering air like thin wine. They seemed to be transfixed in brilliant isolation, the only people left in a world which had been dead since history began.
"But it's wonderful!" she said, for the second time that day. "Do stop, Tim—I want to get the feel of it."
The feel of it was very strange. With the engine switched off there was utter silence all around them; when they got out of the car and walked to the roadside, they found there a dried-up watercourse, bleached by the endless sun, and beside it the horned skull of an animal, cruelly whitened, the eye-sockets staring blindly at the sky. There was nothing else in sight—no house, no human being, no living creature. Away on the far horizon, there was a clump of trees, and a windmill turning, its blades catching the sun. That was all.
"It's absolutely incredible," said Kathy. She was staring about her as if in a dream. "Doesn't anybody live here?"
"Well, farmers."
"Here?"
"Oh yes. They raise some of the best sheep in the world—the Karroo mutton tastes absolutely perfect—I don't know how they turn out so well, but they do. They must eat rocks. ... Of course, the farms are enormous, thousands of acres. In the old days, when they were giving the land away free, you were allowed to mark out as a boundary the distance you could ride between sunrise and sunset. That could be fifty miles—perhaps more. So you could get yourself a farm fifty miles square."
She was still looking about her, entranced by the burning sun, the vast stretches of brown earth, and the raw-boned hill near by, shaped like a crouching lion. At its base, across miles of shimmering heat, she caught a movement, a patch of colour which had shifted imperceptibly. She pointed excitedly. "There's something there!"
He had brought his glasses from the car; now he searched, and presently found the quarry.
"It's a buck, a springbok," he reported. "Beautiful. . . . Take a look."
It was indeed beautiful—a sleek brown shape, dappled with orange and white, its horns curving proudly back; alone and heraldic, it seemed to rule the desert landscape. But even as she looked, the buck moved again, melting away behind a rock as if not choosing to be thus surveyed. They were alone once more.
Presently she said: "Have you noticed how the whole earth seems to be moving, after so long on the ship? You can actually feel it roll."