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    But the damned maps weren’t right. Or else the constantly drifting sand was a landscape that was impossible to map. In vain he had sought
along the horizon for a folded mountain range that was supposed to be there, according to the map. But he hadn’t found it. He wondered whether there was some mysterious disturbance in the sand that made his compass unreliable. Sometimes he was confused at daybreak, thinking that the sun was rising over the horizon at a point where east had not been the day before. Since he had no one to talk to he started talking aloud to himself. So that the ox-drivers wouldn’t think he was losing his mind, he disguised his conversations with himself as religious rituals. He folded his hands, and sometimes he knelt, while out loud he argued with himself about why in hell that mountain range wasn’t where it should be. Why neither the landscape nor the maps were correct. During these sham rituals the ox-drivers would always keep their distance. Occasionally he would also remember to scold them for their laziness, for their unwashed bodies, as he knelt there with folded hands.
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    The days were uneventful. The sun burned with its blinding light from a cloudless sky. The oxen moved sluggishly, as if the sand were a bog. Now and then the silence was broken by the crack of a whip. The ox-drivers might also break out into incomprehensible songs that could last for hours or end abruptly after only a few minutes.
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    He wondered what they thought of him. How had Wackman managed to convince them to leave their families and follow him into the desert? What prophecy or payment did they think he would be able to give them? Their wages were poor, the food meagre, the water strictly rationed. And yet they followed him towards a goal that he had not succeeded in pointing out on the map. One day it will come to an end , he wrote to Matilda. People can only put up with so much. When they realise that the journey is meaningless they may turn against me. There are four of them and only one of me. I have decided to shoot Amos first if they turn hostile. He seems to be their leader, the strongest one. I’ll shoot him with the rifle. Then the important thing is not to miss the other three with my revolver. Every morning and evening I check my weapons to make sure no sand has got into the moving parts.
    He also wondered whether they could read his thoughts. More and more often the ox-drivers would halt the second before he had planned
to raise his hand to give the sign that it was time to stop for their midday rest or to pitch camp for the night. He had written to Matilda about this too. About the invisible language that had been created between himself and the four men who shared his existence.
    Sometimes he tried to imagine that she could read what he was writing. Would she understand? Would she be interested at all? He felt a vague fear and a pang of jealousy when the only answer he could give himself was an image: the way she sat with her breasts bare and her dress pulled up, on top of some other, unknown man.
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    On the twenty-eighth day something happened that would have crucial significance for the man from Hovmantorp. (He had started calling himself that in his mind, a designation of a geographical starting point rather than a meaningless name. He felt that the name Bengler no longer existed. He was Hans Hovmantorp, or simply a man who had once run along the stream that flowed through that little, insignificant village in SmÃ¥land.)
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    On precisely this day, the twenty-eighth since their departure from Cape Town, a strong wind had passed through during the morning hours. He had been forced to tie a handkerchief around his face and shade his eyes with his hand to keep out the sand. A little before ten o’clock the wind vanished and the silence returned. He had just taken off the handkerchief when the oxen suddenly came to a halt. Amos, who was guiding the leading ox,