Piet shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Like anyone else coming into a new job, where the rest of the people have known each other for a long time. He just needs to survive it for a while. That’s all.’

An hour later, they reached a place where the land rose in a pile of giant boulders from the base of thorn scrub and the background curve of riverine forest. As they approached, Sarah could see that there were buildings tucked into the hillside, but they had been cleverly positioned to follow the natural contours of the terrain. They were open at the front, with deep verandahs, and the overhanging roofs were thatched. From the main building a viewing platform jutted out to overlook a waterhole, and the muddy ground was criss-crossed with animal trails and strewn salt, white against the red soil. The rooms were fashioned out of mud, and decorated around the doors and window frames with bands of earthy colours. In several places the boulders formed the walls of the rooms. The entire complex melted into the landscape, so that from a distance it was barely possible to make out the buildings at all. Sarah gazed at it, entranced.

‘Piet! What a brilliant concept. Completely different from any of the main tourist places. Who designed it?’

‘It was my idea. I wanted it to be natural. But I found a mad Polish architect called Viktor Szustak to help me. He fancies himself as a poet, drinks buckets of any available alcohol, and is an absolute genius with a pencil, a few sheets of paper and a ball of string. That’s how he measured everything. I never saw him with a tape measure. I told him what I wanted, how it should feel. Then we came up here and camped for a few days, studying where the wind came from, how the sun hit the kopje at different times of the day, how the shadows fell, where it was coolest in the afternoons. He drew the whole thing out on the ground with a stick first, pegged out all the lines with his string and started building. He made drawings of how each area should look, wrapped around the rocks and the tree trunks. Beautiful pictures that could have been framed for an art show. Nothing technical about them at all, and our labour understood them at once. Even the wiring and the plumbing charts were simple and easy to grasp. No builders’ diagrams, or jargon that only engineers and architects use. The watu love him. They all drank awful pombe together, while they were building. And cases of beer that Viktor brought in his car – that’s probably why everything is so wobbly, heh? But he got them to work like demons, all day, seven days a week. There isn’t a straight line anywhere. Look . . .’