“Since yesterday,” she said, answering the question the man had asked her some twenty minutes past.
“Oh! you’ve found your tongue have you,” said he. “Since yesterday what?”
“Lost.”
“Lost since yesterday?” he stared at her wonderingly. “Oh! you’re mad, right enough, young fellah. The sun’s done your business for you. Here! come and eat.”
She was not too mad to understand that at any rate. There were some loaves of newly-made dough bread lying on a box, each broken in two to let the steam out. Several other boxes were scattered about and the man motioning her to one handed her half a loaf. She took it eagerly, and began to eat at once, almost wolfishly. When she had finished she looked longingly at the other loaves.
“No, you don’t,” said the man, “you’ve had enough for one go.” He had called out an order to some young native boys squatting by the fire, and they now set a tin kettle full of coffee and two beakers before him. He handed her one of the beakers full of hot black liquid and she drank even to the last drop.
“Now,” said he, speaking roughly and emphatically as if to a child with no intelligence. “What you want is sleep. Go and get up into that waggon tent, and sleep, do you understand? No use turning in on the ground for we’re going to trek in an hour. Get off with you now, and sleep till you burst.” His tone was the tone of a born bully, but the girl did not resent it. She climbed on to the waggon-brake as easily as if she had been doing so all her life. A rude, but not unclean mattress surged up to meet her, and she sank into it and slept.
The waggon was moving when she awoke, a delicious slow movement which softly swung the mattress suspended on a wooden frame across the tent, from side to side, and was accompanied by strainings and rumblings, musical creakings as of a ship at sea, but without any of the malaise incidental to ships, for the level of the mattress was always maintained. When the wheels jolted over stones, Vivienne got no more discomfort of it than a bird snug in its nest. From the horseshoe opening of the tent, she could see a light haze of dust rising perpetually from under the wheels, and through it, the landscape rolling out and retreating in changing panorama. Everything was wonderfully peaceful. Sometimes she could hear far ahead the crack of a whip, and a long-drawn-out native cry; then the waggon would lumber more hurriedly through the dust for a while, only to return to the slow even movement of serenely pacing oxen.
Lying idly against her pillow, she watched the sun fall swiftly behind a kop, and the whole land become suffused with orange-coloured light. Then the silver-green of bush and tree turned black and kopjes were etched in India ink against the tinted skies.