They left the office and wandered through the rest of the house. Several of the rooms were open to the sky, and the floors in these rooms were covered in leaves and twigs. Lizards darted for cover, rustling the leaves, and tiny, pink and white geckoes froze where they clung to the walls, taken aback by the totally unfamiliar intrusion. Lizards; geckoes; the dust in the air; this was all it was—an empty house.

Save for the photograph.

MMA POTSANE was pleased once they were out again, and suggested that she show Mma Ramotswe the place where the vegetables had been grown. Again, the land had reasserted itself, and all that remained to show of the scheme was a pattern of wandering ditches, now eroded into tiny canyons. Here and there, it was possible to see where the wooden poles supporting the shade-netting had been erected, but there was no trace of the wood itself, which, like everything else, had been consumed by the ants.

Mma Ramotswe shaded her eyes with a hand.

“All that work,” she mused. “And now this.”

Mma Potsane shrugged her shoulders. “But that is always true, Mma,” she said. “Even Gaborone. Look at all those buildings. How do we know that Gaborone will still be there in fifty years’ time? Have the ants not got their plans for Gaborone as well?”

Mma Ramotswe smiled. It was a good way of putting it. All our human endeavours are like that, she reflected, and it is only because we are too ignorant to realize it, or are too forgetful to remember it, that we have the confidence to build something that is meant to last. Would the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency be remembered in twenty years’ time? Or Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors? Probably not, but then did it matter all that much?

The melancholy thought prompted her to remember. She was not here to dream about archaeology but to try to find out something about what happened all those years ago. She had come to read a place, and had found that there was nothing, or almost nothing, to be read. It was as if the wind had come and rubbed it all out, scattering the pages, covering the footsteps with dust.

She turned to Mma Potsane, who was silent beside her.

“Where does the wind come from, Mma Potsane?”

The other woman touched her cheek, in a gesture which Mma Ramotswe did not understand. Her eyes looked empty, Mma Ramotswe thought; one had dulled, and was slightly milky; she should go to a clinic.

“Over there,” said Mma Potsane, pointing out to the thorn trees and the long expanse of sky, to the Kalahari. “Over there.”

Mma Ramotswe said nothing. She was very close, she felt, to understanding what had happened, but she could not express it, and she could not tell why she knew.

CHAPTER TEN

CHILDREN ARE GOOD FOR BOTSWANA

MR J.L.B. Matekoni’s bad-tempered maid was slouching at the kitchen door, her battered red hat at a careless, angry angle. Her mood had become worse since her employer had revealed his unsettling news, and her waking hours had been spent in contemplating how she might avert catastrophe. The arrangement which she had with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni suited her very well. There was not a great deal of work to do; men never worried about cleaning and polishing, and provided they were well fed they were very untroublesome employers. And she did feed Mr J.L.B. Matekoni well, no matter what that fat woman might be saying to the contrary. She had said that he was too thin! Thin by her standards perhaps, but quite well built by the standards of any normal people. She could just imagine what she had in store for him—spoonfuls of lard for breakfast and thick slices of bread, which would puff him up like that fat chief from the north, the one who broke the chair when he went to visit the house where her cousin worked as a maid.