And she remembered his illness, when his chest had become more and more congested with the disease which killed so many miners, and how she had held his hand at his bedside and how, afterwards, she had gone outside, dazed, wanting to wail, as would be proper, but silent in her grief; and how she had seen a Go-Away bird staring at her from the bough of a tree, and how it had fluttered up, on to a higher branch, and turned round to stare at her again, before flying off; and of a red car that at that moment had passed in the road, with two children in the back, dressed in white dresses, with ribbons in their hair, who had looked at her too, and had waved. And of how the sky looked—heavy with rain, purple clouds stacked high atop one another, and of lightning in the distance, over the Kalahari, linking sky to earth. And of a woman who, not knowing that the world had just ended for her, called out to her from the verandah of the hospital: Come inside, Mma. Do not stand there! There is going to be a storm. Come inside quickly!

NOT FAR away, a small plane on its way to Gaborone flew low over the dam and then, losing height, floated down over the area known as the Village, over the cluster of shops on the Tlokweng Road, and finally, in the last minute of its journey, over the houses that dotted the bush on the airstrip boundary. In one of these, at a window, a girl sat watching. She had been up for an hour or so, as her sleep had been disturbed, and she had decided to get up from her bed and look out of the window. The wheelchair was beside the bed and she was able to manoeuvre herself into it without help. Then, propelling herself over to the open window, she had sat and looked out into the night.

She had heard the plane before she saw its lights. She had wondered what a plane was doing coming in at three in the morning. How could pilots fly at night? How could they tell where they were going in that limitless darkness? What if they took a wrong turn and went out over the Kalahari, where there were no lights to guide them and where it would be like flying within a dark cave?

She watched the plane fly almost directly above the house, and saw the shape of the wings and the cone of brightness which the landing light of the plane projected before it. The noise of the engine was loud now—not just a distant buzz—but a heavy, churning sound. Surely it would wake the household, she thought, but when the plane had dropped down on to the airstrip and the engine faded, the house was still in silence.