Floating in a bodiless dream state through the Kalahari night, he watches as a tall Bantu crawls slowly and silently, like some great black desert lizard, to the crest of a steep star dune and peers over its spine. Below, in the dune's trough, the huge fire that had painted the sky an hour before is dying, reduced to a broad grid of glowing embers that pulse like a breathing creature in the desert wind just beginning to rise from the north. The man can tell from the layout of this camp that it is K'ung, not Bantu, and he knows that not even the presence of Christian missionaries—indicated by the Land-Rover parked on the lee side of a smaller dune to the west—will guarantee him a welcome. Missionaries or no, the man knows that he may be killed if he hails the camp; at the least he will probably be beaten, then stripped of the precious medicinal herbs he has spent the last six days gathering in the open desert. The man inches backward, then abruptly freezes as a strong puff of wind causes the bed of coals below him to flare briefly.
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