Tom Knox - The Marks of Cain

'In what way? How are they different?'

'The Bushmen have distinct genetics and physiognomy. Take the…steatopygia — '

'Steato — what?'

'The enormous buttocks. They are an adaptation to climatic harshness and regular famine. Like a camel's hump. And the women also have something called a Hottentot apron. Francis Galtony the great eugenicist, called it hypertrophy of the nymphae. Which is very delicate. He actually examined the women's vaginas with a sextant.'

'Are you saying,' Amy asked, her voice tremulous, 'that the women of the Bushmen, the Hottentots or whatever, that they have different…genitals?'

'Yes. They do. Different labia. They are distended and slightly askew. If the Bushmen were, like, seagulls, a taxonomist would probably put them in their own category. A subspecies.' Angus smiled in the car mirror at David's appalled and astonished face. 'Incidentally isn't it weird that Eugen Fischer, the greatest eugenicist after Galton, was called Eugen? It's like Charles Darwin's parents calling him Evolute Darwin instead of Chas.' He paused. 'Not that Fischer was the most consistent racist. He wasn't. When he was here he befriended the Kellermans. He liked nice cultured intelligent millionaire Jews in Johannesburg and Cape Town — with beautiful Jewish wives. He was less keen on Zulus. OK where are we?'

Angus stared at the drifting sands ahead. The dunes were nearly all gone now, they were entering a flatter, slightly greener landscape; still desert, but with the odd little camelthorn tree, and yellow acres of pristine dust. David checked his watch. They had been driving for many hours. Hundreds and hundreds of miles, right across central Namibia. They hadn't seen one other human being.

Angus said: 'We should head for Aus. Then across the desert to Rosh.' Angus squinted at the sun. 'Though we're not gonna make Aus before dark…Yes take that track there, by the ranch gates.' He sat back. 'So I was saying about the Hottentots. The Hotties are the sedentary version of the Bushmen, the Khoisan. Anyway, they had these creepy habits that the early researchers found altogether disturbing. Like the priest urinating on the newly wed couple, that wasn't too popular. And the worshipping of grasshoppers. And of course the constant eating of intestines was a big winner. And when they get married the Bushmen have one single teste removed. How weird is that?' He grinned, with a certain wildness. 'I always used to…tease Alfie about that. Told him to come and live with me in Scotland with his one teste. So he could be Monorch of the Glen.'

Amy spoke up, her voice full of emotion: 'Angus, I don't think this is funny.'

'No?'

'Are you simply racist? Or just a bit racist?'

A huge plume of dust was riding behind them, like a bridal train of orange-grey floating on a breeze.

Angus snapped his reply: 'I despise racism. I hate it. Racism is stupid. It's like hating donkeys for not being sheep. Besides…we are all the children of God. All brothers and sisters.'

David was startled.

'You believe in God?'

The scientist was almost angry.

'How can you not believe in God? In a place like this? This is the last and greatest Namibian desert. The Succulent Karoo. Look at it, the driest place in the world, arguably, but watered by the fogs that come off the sea — thataway. Check the farcical trees. Entirely different ecosystem.'

He was pointing at a fat thorny awkward sapling, with massive spikes stark against the cloudless blue.

'Koekerboom. The fauna and flora here are remarkable: lunatic cacti, insane beetles, thousand-year-old trees that burrow underground. There are also hyenas: a uniquely vicious subspecies called the strandwolf. Saw one once near Luderitz, frightened the living shit out of me. They prowl the beaches eating seal pups. Look like stage villains.'

David thought of Miguel, out there, hunting them down. The strandwolf.

Angus was still talking, a determined monologue. 'But this is why I believe. Look at it. Look at it! It's not an accident so many religions come from the desert. And this is the most daunting of all deserts. Look at this landscape!' He waved, quite furiously, at the wilderness. 'I'd like to drop a planeload of atheists at Luderitz airport and send them out across the wastes with a packet of cashew nuts. Within ten days they'd either be dead or believers. Atheists. Fuck 'em. Adolescent wankers.'

David was perplexed. He simply couldn't work out Angus Nairn. He was like no one he had ever met. Angus was still talking.

'Of course that doesn't mean God is this nice guy. He ain't. The universe is fascist. It is a tyranny, a mad dictatorship. Stalin's Terror. Saddam's Iraq. It's all so random and scary. We all lie there at night thinking, when will death come for me? Don't we? And one by one, we disappear. The Death Gestapo comes, and they drag you away, and you are expertly tortured, with lung cancer, heart failure, Alzheimer's.' Angus was talking to himself, almost. 'And people whisper, they tell each other, "You hear about so-and-so? He's gone. He's gone as well. They took him last night…".' He shook his head. 'Alphonse, poor fucking Alphonse…'

The car motored south. Angus was, finally, quite silent.

David thought of his grandfather, and that eagle circling the Arizona sky. The Sonora desert was beautiful, but Angus was right: this desert, the Succulent Karoo, was even more stirring, in a haunted way. The green and yellow bushman's grass, the pale acacias, the pink acid wastes scarred by long disused railways. It was desolate but transfixing: and the violet and purple mountains, the sudden inselbergs, they floated above the hazy and aethereal sands like a kind of memory; a memory of mountains, in the ghost of a landscape.

He stared and drove, and thought of his grandfather. His grandfather's strange and guilty shame.

Desolada, desolada, desolada…

Three hours later the sun had gone, and the violet-purples had turned to grainy black, and they were racing, silently and very fast, through the darkness. The true and noble darkness of the desert.

It was cold.

They were quiet and exhausted. Every so often the eyes of a nocturnal animal would catch in the headlights — a bat-eared fox, a desert hare. Then darkness. And then the headlights illuminated a big sign: Sperrgebiet. Diamond Zone 1. Extreme Danger.

'OK,' said Angus. 'Down that dirt road.'

Two hundred metres further, sudden lights blazed. Two armed black men had emerged from a wooden hut, with rifles cocked. They had torches: their faces were grim and determined.

'Stop!'

Angus leaned out of the car.

'Solomon. Tilac. It's me!'

A silence.

'Angus?'

Now the men were smiling.

'Angus. You de bloody mad man. We could have shoot you!'

'Sorry — sorry — '

The guards stepped back. One of them was flamboyantly waving them through.

They sped past; the untarred road was rumbling and rocky. Though it was hard to tell in the silvering darkness, the landscape seemed to have changed. The night air was still cooler. David realized he could smell the sea, salty and pungent.

And there indeed was the ocean, glittering malevolently in the moonlight. The road ran up and over seaside rocks, bare grey rocks. Ahead of them was the twinkle of more lights: the silhouette of structure, a large complex of buildings, bristling with antennae and satellite dishes.

'Tamara Minehead,' said Angus. 'Park here.'

The reaction to their arrival was immediate: several men came straight out, one of them a tall and languid white man, in an intoxicatingly impractical grey flannel suit.

'Nathan,' said Angus, very wearily. 'This is Amy…Myerson and David…Martinez. Friends…those friends of Eloise. Friends, this is Nathan Kellerman.'

Nathan Kellerman stepped closer. He was young and handsome.