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were his jars and metal containers of alcohol waiting for insects, his drawing materials and provisions. As yet he hadn’t been able to discover if any of the ox-drivers had begun stealing. Each time he made these checks he felt a surge of shame shoot up through his body. What right, really, did he have to mistrust these men, who were the reason that he made progress each day, who pitched his tent and prepared his meals? On several occasions, most often in the evenings, he wrote to Matilda about this. He nearly always used the word caste , as if it had become a sacred term in this connection. The caste who decreed, and those who took orders about what had to be done.
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    The two months they had been travelling through the desert had altered his entire perception of what the purpose of life actually was. He continued to believe resolutely in his idea that an unknown fly, or perhaps a beetle or butterfly, would provide a reason for his whole existence. Yet at the same time the sand, which was hopelessly incomprehensible, had forced him to look back at his life. The wagon rolled slowly onwards behind the oxen. Within him he was always walking backwards, or inwards, towards something, but he knew not what. Clarity? An understanding of what an individual could or should be? Each morning when they struck camp he selected an idea that he would work on for that day. Since he was poorly trained in philosophy, he had to formulate the big questions in his own mind as best he could.
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    One day he had pondered love, from the early morning until he fell asleep exhausted that evening. He was thirsty because from the beginning they had had to ration the water. To Matilda he wrote in his book that the grace of love was incomprehensible to him. But that the erotic game she had taught him could still fill him with strong desire.
    That day the desert had filled him with hate, because there was
nowhere he could go to and masturbate. And by evening, when he was alone in his tent, the desire was gone.
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    One night he was awakened by a strange silence. At first he didn’t understand what it was. Then he realised that his father’s jaws had stopped grinding. He lit the lamp, looked at his watch and noted the time in his diary. Without knowing it for sure, he was convinced that his father had died. He had been sitting on his chair in the arbour and when the housekeeper crept in to fetch him, his jaws were still and his heart dead. Bengler felt no sorrow, no pain or loss. But he did feel an impatience that was difficult to control. How long would it take before he could get confirmation that it was true? That his father had really stopped grinding his jaws on that very night?
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    After two weeks in the desert he had caught his first insect. It was Amos who found it. A very small beetle with a greenish-blue shell that was walking slowly through the sand. He identified it in one of the British entomological lexicons that he had brought along. To his astonishment he read that the Bushmen made a lethal poison from the secretion of this beetle. He stuffed it into one of his jars, filled it with alcohol and labelled it. Slowly he had begun to convert his wagon into a museum.
    But the journey itself was still what was most important. He had decided that the trading post somewhere ahead of them would serve as the base for his expedition. From there he could organise his hunt for ostriches; from there he could plan, in an entirely different manner, his search for the unknown insect. There would be people he could converse with. He imagined that everything would be there that made a life possible. A hymn book, an old pump organ, ledgers and regular meals. He vaguely hoped that there would also be a woman waiting for him, someone who, like Matilda, might visit him once a week, sit on him and then drink a glass of port.
    That had been among the last of his purchases in Cape Town before he said farewell to Wackman: two bottles of Portuguese