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watch while they were eating below in the saloon. “Do you
understand this?” he asked, pointing to the screen.
    “No,” she said.
    “I’d appreciate it if you’d take over the watch now,” he
said. “All you need to do is to sit outside in the cockpit and keep a lookout.
However,” he continued, “you need to call me when the following happens:  If
you see a ship anywhere, to the front or the back, left or right. If the wind
changes and the sails start flapping and don’t fill up again, you call me as
well. I am going to sleep now but I will relieve you in four hours.”
    “That’s all?”
    “That’s all. Just sit there and keep your eyes open. Don’t
touch anything. Don’t press any buttons or levers and don’t try to steer. Everything
is set as it should be. The autopilot will take care of everything.”
     He accompanied his crew on deck and took a last look around
before heading for the companionway. Five minutes later he had occasion to
shout. Madeleine rushed below and found him in his office.
    “What happened?” she asked.
    “It’s Tencent,” he said, “Tencent dropped by twenty
percent.”
     “Really? Which ten cents are you talking about? Are you OK?
Weren’t you going to bed?”
    “I’m all right,” he said.
    “What were you shouting about then?” Madeleine looked at him
quizzically. The bleary-eyed, unshaven yachtsman looked rather incongruous in
front the polished desk with three oversized monitors arranged around it.
    “I shorted Tencent. Tencent is not change in your pocket. It
is a massive internet service provider in China, one of the biggest in the
world. I put in a short two weeks back and a few hours ago the stock fell by
twenty percent.”
    “Which means what?”
    “It means that I have just made a ton of money.”
    “Really? How much?”
    “Five hundred and thirty two thousand US dollars.”
    “Whow! That’s not bad at all! So what do we do now? Are we
celebrating? I saw the champagne bottles.”
    “No, not now. Later. Now I want to sleep.”
    Madeleine was still intrigued. “How can you sleep?  You
don’t make this kind of money every day, or do you?”
    “Not every day,” he laughed. “But regularly. At least once
every two months.”
    “It’s still good,” she said. “How do you do that so regularly?”
     “I’m a trader with my own secret recipe,” he said.
    “It sounds interesting. It last I know where your money
comes from. What do you trade in?”
    “I trade in shares, commodities, indexes, currencies - the
works.”
    “Where?”
    “On all the major stock exchanges of the world.”
    “But aren’t you on holiday now?”
    “Not at all. This is my office. The only one I have. From
here I trade anywhere I like.”
     “Congratulations! You appear to be very good at what you
are doing.”
    “I’m the best. In my country there’s nobody who comes even close.”
    “So what do you do with all your money?”
    “I’m getting myself an entire farm on a mountain not far
from Cape Town. Up there I’m going to build a castle from where I can look down
on everybody else.”
    ***
    On the hot side several layers of ancient sea beds clung to the
basalt core of the mountain. Remarkably, every layer was still perfectly
horizontal, even after six million years. The two KhoiKhoi sorcerers
scrambled downwards over the old sea beds, which were now crumbling sandstone
terraces. Soon they disappeared into a dense growth of what the Dutch – and the KhoiKhoi nowadays - called Sugar Bush.  In winter these bushes sported
masses of conical flowers, ranging in colour from dark red to shocking white.
All of these flowers produced copious amounts of sweet nectar, which excited
the sunbirds and the bees and attracted even larger animals such as baboons. In
fact, in the flowering time the four troops of baboons that called the mountain
home practically camped in these bushes, hunting scorpions for protein and
drinking nectar for energy. In addition, it has