That, she thought, was exactly what one would want to hear of boots. It did not matter so much with ordinary town shoes, but it mattered a great deal with boots. If one were going into danger—and the Okavango Delta was filled with wild animals—then it would undoubtedly be a good thing to have shoes that could look after themselves in difficult conditions.

That’s us, Boss! said the boots. That’s us, all right.

She continued walking, coming to the end of Odi Drive and turning onto Maratadiba Road. There were deserted houses on that corner—old buildings now half eaten by termites, half covered in the bush that grows so quickly over human efforts. It was a good place for snakes, she thought; even here in the city, in these forgotten corners of wasteland, snakes might make their homes: cobras, puff adders, even mambas. She glanced at the tangle of vegetation that had been brought by the recent rains. Everything greened so quickly, transformed from thinness and brownness, thickened, ran riot. She gazed at the derelict windows, their glass broken; at the bulging walls that would surely soon collapse. Yes, there were snakes there, but she had these boots, and that was exactly what boots were for.

She stopped. She looked behind her, back in the direction of Tlokweng. The radio had spoken of rain, and the sky confirmed the forecast. A bank of purple cloud had built up to the east, and even as she had been walking from the shops it had grown in size and anger. Now it filled half the sky; to the west it was light and sunny, to the east it was storms and rain. It happened so quickly, the clouds sweeping in within minutes. And with them was that smell of rain, that half dusty smell that was like no other, overpowering in the intensity of its associations for anyone raised in a dry country. It was synonymous with joy, with renewal, with life itself.

Pula, she muttered; a word that stood for so much, that meant joy, and money, and rain. And rain it was, with initial, fat drops falling on the dusty ground to make a tiny crater in the sand; and then another million such craters before the ground became a shimmer of water. It was so sudden, and she looked around as the water began to stream down her face. It was in her eyes; warm and welcome, but to be wiped away so that she could see through the watery curtain of white that was all about her.

The only place to shelter was one of the deserted houses, almost obscured now in the torrent of the storm. She ran, her boots making her sure-footed in the water and mud. There was a door, which stood ajar, and beyond it a room in which the ceiling boards hung down in fragments. All this work, all this human effort, all brought to this.