She was silent for a while, gazing from the window as she leaned back in her seat Dare had bought some pineapples at De Aar that the natives were selling on the platform, and he cut one of the fruit in half, and gave it to her with a spoon, that being, he assured her, the only way in which a pineapple should be eaten.
“If I had come alone,” Pamela said, “I should have fared badly.”
“You couldn’t have made this journey alone,” he said decidedly. “It’s unthinkable.”
The wind was rising steadily, a hot wind, that stirred the sticky red sand and carried it in clouds towards them till it covered everything. Whirlpools of red dust, rising skyward like tongues of furiously swirling flame, travelled with extraordinary velocity along the ground. There were farms here too, and cultivated patches of grain, and more lean sheep; and at infrequent intervals, marking a spot of beauty in this sterile waste, grew low, spiky, darkly green bushes starred with white blossom resembling cherry blossom, and straggling clumps of the prickly pear.
“And people live on these lonely farms,” Pamela said. “I wonder what their lives are like? Think of it, day after day—only this.”
“Fairly dull,” Dare commented. “But it’s extraordinary how little they regard it. I’ve stayed on some of these Karroo farms. It isn’t half bad.”
“As an experience, perhaps not... But to live there!”
“There are conditions,” he returned, “in which such isolation might be agreeable.”
“They would be quite extraordinary conditions,” she rejoined. “Most of those people are probably ordinary folk with ordinary feelings. I can’t imagine it myself. It appears to me depressingly monotonous. How tired they must grow of one another.”
He looked amused.