Amy glanced at David. Then she said: ‘Angus, if you want to…be alone for while…we can…’
‘No no no. I’m fine. I’m fine. Let me talk. Let me explain. Amy, the Basters were hated and despised from both sides because they were such unusual half castes, such extreme hybrids. The racial prejudice they faced drove them north, across the thirstland, into Namibia. So they settled here on the high plateau south of Windhoek. And they farmed cattle.’ Angus gestured through the car window at a passing butcher’s shop, with fiercely caged windows. ‘They actually founded their own nation with its own flag and anthem. The nation of the bastards. That’s what Baster means. Bastard.’ Angus chuckled. ‘And they’re still here today. A precious genetic remnant. The unique inheritance of the Basters makes them rhapsodically beautiful – cocoa coloured, high cheekboned, sometimes blond yet simultaneously dark. Literally the most beautiful people in the world. As you can see – look at that girl there, by the post office. Stunning. They also like a drink, and they gamble. And they brawl. All the time, whenever they get drunk. Clock the fences. OK, here’s the house. Alfie’s mum. Five minutes.’
It was a bright blue bungalow, with a basketball hoop over the garage, and another tall wire fence around a neat if austere grass space. It could have been a house in America, but for the burning African sun and the acacia trees on the street and the strange slender beautiful cheekboned people laughing on the stoop of the Lutheran Church with the lurid green Le Palace gambling hall next door.
David and Amy said nothing. They sat in the car in the heat and she touched his hand and he squeezed her hand and they said nothing.
The Scotsman emerged.
‘That was…fun.’ He waved away any inquiries, and ordered David to drive on. ‘Drive south. Let’s just get there. Just get to the Sperrgebiet as fast as we can. Go!’
As they drove he talked – and talked. He talked of the Basters and Eugen Fischer. He spoke, it seemed, as a therapeutic measure. David listened to the mesmerizing babble of Angus’s talk. Half soothed, half alarmed. The deserts were encroaching again, as they sped south along the straight back road at a hundred miles an hour. The road was so empty and straight and good and flat it felt like they were doing thirty, across the wilderness. They saw virtually no other cars.
‘So you want to know why Fischer was here. In Rehoboth. In Namibia. Right? Yeah?’
David shrugged.
‘I guess.’
‘Simple answer. Because it’s such a paradise for someone interested in genetics, like Fischer. There is more human genetic variation in Africa than anywhere else on earth. And there is maybe more in Namibia than anywhere in Africa. From the Nama to the Cape Malay to the purebred Boer. And I’ve sampled them all. I got them all. I’ve even sampled the khoisan, the Bushmen! Alfie’s ancestors…They are very important, to the Fischer experiments. Now we need to go right, off road. Use the track.’
The wastes swallowed them, at once. The car growled along a dead valley, another vlei of dust and flattened salt. The dunes were smaller than before.
Angus went on: ‘So what was Fischer doing here? Fischer believed that, technically, the Bushmen were a special kind of human. Certainly they are a unique adaptation to the dry desert lands. They are very small, and nimble, but they have all the necessary features, as it were. They have been cleverly miniaturized by evolution. Like Japanese electronics. I call them the Sony Bushman.’
‘In what way? How are they different?’
‘The Bushmen have distinct genetics and physiognomy. Take the…steatopygia -’
‘Steato – what?’
‘The enormous buttocks. They are an adaptation to climatic harshness and regular famine. Like a camel’s hump. And the women also have something called a Hottentot apron. Francis Galtony the great eugenicist, called it hypertrophy of the nymphae. Which is very delicate. He actually examined the women’s vaginas with a sextant.’
‘Are you saying,’ Amy asked, her voice tremulous, ‘that the women of the Bushmen, the Hottentots or whatever, that they have different…genitals?’
‘Yes. They do. Different labia. They are distended and slightly askew. If the Bushmen were, like, seagulls, a taxonomist would probably put them in their own category. A subspecies.’ Angus smiled in the car mirror at David’s appalled and astonished face. ‘Incidentally isn’t it weird that Eugen Fischer, the greatest eugenicist after Galton, was called Eugen? It’s like Charles Darwin’s parents calling him Evolute Darwin instead of Chas.’ He paused. ‘Not that Fischer was the most consistent racist. He wasn’t. When he was here he befriended the Kellermans. He liked nice cultured intelligent millionaire Jews in Johannesburg and Cape Town – with beautiful Jewish wives. He was less keen on Zulus. OK where are we?’
Angus stared at the drifting sands ahead. The dunes were nearly all gone now, they were entering a flatter, slightly greener landscape; still desert, but with the odd little camelthorn tree, and yellow acres of pristine dust. David checked his watch. They had been driving for many hours. Hundreds and hundreds of miles, right across central Namibia. They hadn’t seen one other human being.
Angus said: ‘We should head for Aus. Then across the desert to Rosh.’ Angus squinted at the sun. ‘Though we’re not gonna make Aus before dark…Yes take that track there, by the ranch gates.’ He sat back. ‘So I was saying about the Hottentots. The Hotties are the sedentary version of the Bushmen, the Khoisan. Anyway, they had these creepy habits that the early researchers found altogether disturbing. Like the priest urinating on the newly wed couple, that wasn’t too popular. And the worshipping of grasshoppers. And of course the constant eating of intestines was a big winner. And when they get married the Bushmen have one single teste removed. How weird is that?’ He grinned, with a certain wildness. ‘I always used to…tease Alfie about that. Told him to come and live with me in Scotland with his one teste. So he could be Monorch of the Glen.’
Amy spoke up, her voice full of emotion: ‘Angus, I don’t think this is funny.’
‘No?’
‘Are you simply racist? Or just a bit racist?’
A huge plume of dust was riding behind them, like a bridal train of orange-grey floating on a breeze.
Angus snapped his reply: ‘I despise racism. I hate it. Racism is stupid. It’s like hating donkeys for not being sheep. Besides…we are all the children of God. All brothers and sisters.’
David was startled.
‘You believe in God?’
The scientist was almost angry.
‘How can you not believe in God? In a place like this? This is the last and greatest Namibian desert. The Succulent Karoo. Look at it, the driest place in the world, arguably, but watered by the fogs that come off the sea – thataway. Check the farcical trees. Entirely different ecosystem.’
He was pointing at a fat thorny awkward sapling, with massive spikes stark against the cloudless blue.
‘Koekerboom. The fauna and flora here are remarkable: lunatic cacti, insane beetles, thousand-year-old trees that burrow underground. There are also hyenas: a uniquely vicious subspecies called the strandwolf. Saw one once near Luderitz, frightened the living shit out of me. They prowl the beaches eating seal pups. Look like stage villains.’
David thought of Miguel, out there, hunting them down. The strandwolf.
Angus was still talking, a determined monologue. ‘But this is why I believe. Look at it. Look at it! It’s not an accident so many religions come from the desert. And this is the most daunting of all deserts. Look at this landscape!’ He waved, quite furiously, at the wilderness. ‘I’d like to drop a planeload of atheists at Luderitz airport and send them out across the wastes with a packet of cashew nuts. Within ten days they’d either be dead or believers. Atheists. Fuck ’em. Adolescent wankers.’