At each corner Tsotsi passed he looked briefly, if at all, down another bank of vacant walls. The black squares of double doors, side entrances, high barred windows, chequered the night with another variant of the severe pattern. The street lamps, spaced at unvarying intervals along the edges of the pavements, added a final, strict rhythm to the monotony of the night with the movement of his shadow. Beside him, then ahead, then behind, passing in a strange, unageing metamorphosis from almost jet black to a greying insubstantiality that finally seeped away into the bricks, only to reappear later behind him and repeat the cycle. If Tsotsi had had eyes for such things he would have seen in the world around him an enormous model of the inward maze of his images, a world seemingly without beginning or end. It was not just by chance that he finally achieved his purpose and found his moment to think in something like peace only when he emerged out of this labyrinth.

More than anything else, the effect of turning that last corner was a sensation of space, of tremendous lift and room to breathe again as if a silent detonation that moment had blasted apart the ingrown complexities in the city. The road he had turned into was broad, and on one side dropped steeply into an expanse of uncrowded earth that cut deeply through the city like the dry course of a mighty summerthunder torrent. This was the principal railway artery of the city and at the point where Tsotsi stood it had begun its gradual lift out of earth before fanning out its innumerable pairs of parallel tracks to every corner of the country.

The city was strung out on the opposite side in a toothed silhouette that at the most stole a few paltry inches from the generous curve of sky overhead. A three-quarter moon had risen clear of the ragged building line and was shining with intense purity. It was at the moon that Tsotsi looked for the few minutes he paused on the corner. With his first sight of it, and the surprize of seeing it so unexpectedly, had come one thought. Its effect was a serenity as calm and cold as the moonlight itself.

It was the same moon of last night. Last night! The bluegum trees were last night.

A little way further the road skirted extensive marshalling yards. Tsotsi hurried down, eager to sit there and think. Beyond a heavy, metal fence was a stretch of weedy grass. He would be safe there from prowling police cars. It was a scene of melancholic and intermittent activity, as if the remnants of a herd of primeval, armour-plated beasts were kraaled here and their brute force trained into man’s service. They filled the night with the shunt and snort of their labour. The ceaseless coupling and uncoupling of coaches, the jolting, jarring moments when engines hooked up, rang out in hard, metallic noise. A few of the big locos, black and steaming with sweat it seemed, stood massively still under the tall floodlamps. They whistled from time to time, mostly in a flat, whispery note like the penny flutes of the township streets. But just occasionally a whistle would stream out that was all sound, a clean, ululating endless vowel. Among them, moving like nonchalant shepherds, strolled lonely men with lanterns swinging in their hands.