Let the vampire's creaking wing Hide the stars while banshees sing; Let the ghouls gorge all night long; Dreams will keep you safe and strong.

Skeletons with poison teeth, Risen from the world beneath, Ogre, troll, and loup-garou, Bloody wraith who looks like you, Shadow on the window shade, Harpies in a midnight raid, Goblins seeking tender prey, Dreams will chase them all away.

Dreams are like a magic cloak Woven by the fairy folk, Covering from top to toe, Keeping you from winds and woe.

And should the Angel come this night To fetch your soul away from light, Cross yourself, and face the wall: Dreams will help you not at all.

Outside the strand wolf screamed again. Mondaugen pounded a bag of dirty laundry into a pillow, doused the light, and lay down trembling on the rug to sleep.

III.

But his own musical commentary on dreams had not included the obvious and perhaps for him indispensable: that if dreams are only waking sensation first stored and later operated on, then the dreams of a voyeur can never be his own. This soon showed up, not too surprisingly, as an increasing inability to distinguish Godolphin from Foppl: it may or may not have been helped along by Vera Meroving, and some of it could have been dreamed. There, precisely, was the difficulty. He'd no idea, for instance, where this had come from: . . . so much rot spoken about their inferior kultur-position and our herrenschaft - but that was for the Kaiser and the businessmen at home; no one, not even our gay Lothario (as we called the General), believed it out here. They may have been as civilized as we, I'm not an anthropologist, you can't compare anyway - they were an agricultural, pastoral people. They loved their cattle as we perhaps love toys from childhood. Under Leutwein's administration the cattle were taken away and given to white settlers. Of course the Hereros revolted, though the Bondelswaartz Hottentots actually started it because their chief Abraham Christian had been shot in Warmbad. No one is sure who fired first. It's an old dispute: who knows, who cares? The flint had been struck, and we were needed, and we came.

Foppl. Perhaps.

Except that the shape of Mondaugen s "conspiracy" with Vera Meroving was finally beginning to come clear to him. She apparently wanted Godolphin, for reasons he could only guess at, though her desire seemed to arise out of a nostalgic sensuality whose appetites knew nothing at all of nerves, or heat, but instead belonged entirely to the barren touchlessness of memory. She had obviously needed Mondaugen only to be called (he might assume cruelly) a long-ago son, to weaken her prey.

Not unreasonably then she would also have used Foppl, perhaps to replace the father as she thought she'd replaced the son, Foppl the siege party's demon, who was in fact coming more and more to define his guests assembled, to prescribe their common dream. Possibly Mondaugen alone among them was escaping it, because of his peculiar habits of observation. So in a passage (memory, nightmare, yarn, maundering, anything) ostensibly his host's Mondaugen could at least note that though the events were Foppl's, the humanity could easily have been Godolphin's.

Again one night he heard the Dies Irae, or some organized foreign chant, approach to the verge of his buffer zone of empty rooms. Feeling invisible he glided out to look and not be seen. His neighbor, an elderly merchant from Milan, had in recent days it seemed collapsed from a heart attack, lingered, died. The others, roisterers, had organized a wake. With ceremony they wrapped his body in silk sheets stripped from his bed: but before the last brightness of dead flesh had been covered Mondaugen saw in a quick sly look its decoration of furrows and poor young scar tissue cut down in its prime. Sjambok, makoss, donkey whip . . . something long that could cut.

They took the cadaver off to a ravine to toss it in. One stayed behind.

"He remains in your room, then," she began.

"By choice."

"He has no choice. You'll make him go."

"You'll have to make him go, Fraulein."

"Then bring me to him?" almost importunate. Her eyes, rimmed in black after Foppl's 1904, needed something less hermetic than this empty corridor to frame them: palazzo's facade, provincial square, esplanade in the winter - yet more human, perhaps only more humorous than, say, the Kalahari. It was her inability to come to rest anywhere inside plausible extremes, her nervous, endless motion, like the counter-crepitating of the ball along its roulette spokes, seeking a random compartment but finally making, having made, sense only as precisely the dynamic uncertainty she was, this that upset Mondaugen enough to scowl quietly and say with a certain dignity no, turn, leave her there and, return to his sferics. They both knew he'd done nothing decisive.

Having found the sad imitation of a strayed son, Godolphin wouldn't think of returning to his own room. One of them had taken the other in. The old officer slept, drowsed, talked. Because he'd "found" Mondaugen only after she'd well begun some program of indoctrination on him that Mondaugen would rather not guess at, there was no way to say for certain, later, whether Foppl himself might not have come in to tell tales of when he'd been a trooper, eighteen years ago.

Eighteen years ago everyone was in better condition. You were shown how his upper arms and thighs had become flabby; and the roll of fat around his middle. His hair was beginning to fall out. He was developing breasts; even they reminded him of when he first arrived in Africa. They'd all had their inoculations on route: for bubonic plague the ship's medic jabbed you with a tremendous needle in the muscle by the left breast, and for a week or so it puffed up. In the way troops have when there's not much else to do, they amused themselves by unbuttoning the tops of their shirts and coyly exposing these new female acquisitions.

Later, when it had got into deep winter, the sun bleached their hair white and browned their skins. The standing joke was "Don't walk up on me unless you're in uniform, I might mistake you for a nigger." The "mistake" was made more than once. Around Waterberg especially, he remembered, when they were chasing Hereros into the bush and the desert, there were a few unpopular soldiers - reluctant? humanitarian. Their bitching got so bad you found yourself hoping . . . How much of a "mistake" it was was open to question, that's all be meant. By him bleeding hearts like that weren't much better than the natives.

Most of the time, thank God, you were with your own kind: comrades who all felt the same way, who weren't going to give you any nonsense no matter what you did. When a man wants to appear politically moral he speaks of human brotherhood. In the field you actually found it. You weren't ashamed. For the first time in twenty years of continuous education-to-guilt, a guilt that had never really had meaning, that the Church and the secular entrenched had made out of whole cloth; after twenty years, simply not to he ashamed. Before you disemboweled or whatever you did with her to be able to take a Herero girl before the eyes of your superior officer, and stay potent. And talk with them before you killed them without the sheep's eye, the shuffling, the prickly-heat of embarrassment . . .

His efforts at the code, such as they were, didn't succeed in keeping back the nightfall of ambiguity that filled his room progressively as time - such as it was - went by. When Weissmann came in and asked if he could help, Mondaugen turned surly. "Out," he snarled.

"But we were to collaborate."

"I know what your interest is," Mondaugen said mysteriously. "I know what 'code' you're after."

"It's part of my job." Putting on his sincere farm-lad face, removing the eyeglasses and cleaning them mock-distracted on his necktie.

"Tell her it won't, it didn't work," Mondaugen said.

The lieutenant ground his teeth solicitously. "I can't indulge your whims much longer," he tried to explain; "Berlin is impatient, I'm not going to make excuses forever."

"I am working for you?" Mondaugen screamed. "Scheisse." But this woke up Godolphin, who began to sing splinters of sentimental ballads and to call for his Evan. Weissmann regarded the old man with wide eyes and only his two front teeth showing.

"My God," he said finally, tonelessly; about-faced and left.

But when Mondaugen found the first oscillograph roll missing he was charitable enough to ask, "Lost or taken?" out loud to his inert equipment and a faraway old skipper, before putting the blame on Weissmann.

"He must have come in when I was asleep." Not even Mondaugen knew when that was. And was the roll all he'd taken? Shaking Godolphin: "Do you know who I am, where we are," and other elementary questions that we shouldn't ask, that only prove how afraid we are to a hypothetical anybody.

Afraid he was and as it turned out with good reason. For, half an hour later, the old man still sat on the edge of the bed, making friends with Mondaugen, whom he was seeing for the first time. With the Weimar Republic's bitter breed of humor (but none of his own) Mondaugen stood at his stained-glass window and asked that evening's veld: was I being that successful a voyeur? As his days at the siege party became less current and more numbered (though not by him) he was to wonder with exponential frequency who in fact had seen him. Anyone at all? Being cowardly and thus a gourmet of fear, Mondaugen prepared himself for an unprecedented, exquisite treat. This unglimpsed item on his menu of anxieties took the form of a very German question: if no one has seen me then am I really here at all; and as a sort of savory, if I am not here then where are all these dreams coming from, if dreams is what they are.

He was given a lovely mare named Firelily: how he adored that animal! You couldn't keep her from prancing and posturing; she was a typical woman. How her deep sorrel flanks and hindquarters would flash in the sun! He was careful to have his Bastard servant keep her always curried and clean. He believed the first time the General ever addressed him directly was to compliment him on Firelily.

He rode her all over the territory. From the coastal desert to the Kalahari, from Warmbad to the Portuguese frontier Firelily and he, and his good comrades Schwach and Fleische, they dashed madcap over sand, rock, bush; forded streams that could go from a trickle to a mile-wide flood in half an hour. Always, no matter which region it was through those ever-dwindling herds of blacks. What were they chasing? What youthful dream?

For it was hard to avoid a feeling of impracticality about their adventure. Idealism, fatedness. As if first the missionaries, then the merchants and miners, and lately the settlers and bourgeoisie had all had their chance at something and had failed, and now it was the army's turn. To go in and chase about that silly wedge of German earth two tropics away for no other reason, apparently, than to give the warrior class equal time with God, Mammon, Freyr. Certainly not for the usual soldatesque reasons-young as they were they could see that. Next to nothing to plunder; and as for glory, what was there to hanging, clubbing, bayoneting something that did not resist? It had been a terribly unequal show from the start: Hereros were simply not the adversaries a young warrior expects. He felt cheated out of the army life the posters had shown. Only a pitiful minority of the niggers were even armed, and then only a fraction of those had rifles that worked, or ammunition. The army had Maxim and Krupp guns, and little howitzers. Often they never even saw the natives before they killed them; merely stood off on a kopje and bombarded the village, then went in afterward to finish any they'd missed.

His gums ached, he felt tired and possibly slept mare than normal, whatever normal was. But this had modulated at some paint into yellow skin, high thirst, flat purple spots on his legs; and his own breath sickened him. Godolphin in one of his lucid moments diagnosed this as scurvy, the cause being simply had (in fact hardly any) diet: he'd lost twenty pounds since the beginning of the siege.

"You want fresh vegetables," the sea dog informed him, fretting. "There must be something in the larder."

"No. For God's sake," Mondaugen raved, "don't leave the room. Hyenas and jackals are padding up and down those little corridors."

"Try to lie quietly," Godolphin told him. "I can handle myself. I won't be a moment."

Mondaugen lunged off the bed, but flaccid muscles betrayed him. Nimble Godolphin vanished, the door swung to. Far the first time since hearing about the Treaty of Versailles in detail, Mondaugen found himself crying.

They'll drain his juices, he thought; caress his bones with their paw-pads, gag on his fine white hair.

Mondaugen's own father had died not so many years ago, somehow involved in the Kiel revolt. That the son should think of him at this point indicated perhaps that Godolphin hadn't been the only one in that room to be "visited." As the partying rushed in phantasmagoria at and around their supposedly insulated turret, into blur, there had grown increasingly more visible one unwavering projection on the wall of night: Evan Godolphin, whom Mondaugen had never seen save by the dubious fluorescence of nostalgia he didn't want, nostalgia forced on him by something he was coming to look on as a coalition.

Presently, heavy footsteps approached through the outer regions of his Versuchsstelle. Too heavy, he decided, to be Godolphin's returning: so craftily Mondaugen wiped his gums once more on the bedsheets and allowed himself to fall off the bed and roll back under an arras of satin comforter, into that cool, dusty world of old burlesque jokes and so many unhappy-go-accident-prone lovers in this real life. He made a little peephole in the coverlet and looked out: his view was directly into a high mirror that commanded, say, a third of the circular room. The knob turned, the door opened and Weissmann, draped in an ankle-length white dress with ruffled neck, bodice and sleeves, circa 1904, tiptoed into the room, crossing between the mirror's frontiers and vanishing again near the sferic equipment. All at once a dawn chorus burst from the loudspeaker, chaotic at first but resolving eventually into a deep-space madrigal for three or four voices. To which the intruder Weissmann, out of sight, added still another, in falsetto, to a minor-keyed Charleston: Now that the twilight's just beginning, World, stop Spinning; Cuckoo's in his clock with laryngitis, So he can't tell us what night tonight is.

No one among the other dancers has Any Answers, just You, I, the night And a little black sjambok . . .

When Weissmann came back into the mirror he was carrying another oscillograph roll. Mondaugen lay among dust babies, feeling too impotent to yell stop, thief. The transvestite lieutenant had parted his hair in the middle and larded his eyelashes with mascara; these, batting against his lenses, left dark parallel streaks so that each eye looked out from its own prison window. As he passed the imprint on the coverlet of the scurvified body which had lately occupied it, Weissmann gave it (so Mondaugen fancied) a coy, sidewise smile. Then he vanished. Not too long after that Mondaugen's retinae withdrew, for a time from light. Or it is presumed they did; either that or Under-the-Bed is even stranger country than neurasthenic children have dreamt it to be.

One could as well have been a stonemason. It dawned on you slowly, but the conclusion was irresistible: you were in no sense killing. The voluptuous feeling of safety, the delicious lassitude you went into the extermination with was sooner or later replaced by a very curious-not emotion because part of it was obviously a lack of what we commonly call "feeling" - "functional agreement" would come closer to it; operational sympathy.

The first clear instance of it he could remember came one day during a trek from Warmbad to Keetmanshoop. His outfit were moving consignments of Hottentot prisoners for some reason which doubtless made sense to the upper echelons. It was 140 miles and took generally a week or ten days to do, and none of them liked the detail much. A lot of prisoners died on route, and that meant stopping the whole trek, finding the sergeant with the keys, who it seemed was always miles back under a kameeldoorn tree, dead drunk or well on the way, then riding back, unlocking the neck-ring of the fellow who'd died; sometimes rearranging the line so the weight of the extra chain would be more evenly distributed. Not to make it easier on them, exactly, but so one wouldn't wear out any more blacks than one had to.

It was a glorious day, December and hot, a bird somewhere gone mad with the season. Firelily, under him, seemed sexually aroused, she curveted and frolicked so about the line of march, covering five miles to the prisoners' one. From the side it always looked medieval, the way the chain hung down in bights between their neck-rings, the way the weight pulled them constantly toward earth, the force only just overcome as long as they managed to keep their legs moving. Behind them came army oxcarts, driven by loyal Rehoboth Bastards. How many can understand the resemblance he saw? In his village church in the Palatinate was a mural of the Dance of Death, led by a rather sinuous, effeminate Death in his black cloak, carrying his scythe and followed by all ranks of society from prince to peasant. Their own African progress was hardly so elegant: they could only boast a homogeneous string of suffering Negroes and a drunken sergeant in a wideawake hat who carried a Mauser. Yet that association, which most of them shared, was enough to give the unpopular chore an atmosphere of ceremony.

The trek hadn't been under way more than an hour before one of the blacks began to complain about his feet. They were bleeding, he said. His overseer brought Firelily close in and looked: so they were. Hardly would the blood soak into the sand than the prisoner behind would kick it invisible. Not long after that the same prisoner complained that the sand was working its way into the cuts on his feet and the pain was making it difficult for him to walk. No doubt this was also true. He was told either to be quiet or forfeit his share of water when they outspanned for the noon rest. The soldiers had learned on previous treks that if one native was allowed to complain the others soon enough took it up and this for some reason slowed everyone. They wouldn't sing or chant; that perhaps could have been borne. But the wailing, self-indulgent babel that would go up - God, it was awful. Silence, for practical reasons, was the rule and was enforced.

But this Hottentot would not keep silent. He was only limping slightly, he didn't stumble. But he bitched more than the most malcontent of infantry. The young trooper edged Firelily toward him in her sensual strut and flicked him once or twice with a sjambok. From the height of a man on horseback a good rhinoceros sjambok used properly can quiet a nigger in less time and with less trouble than it takes to shoot him. But it had no effect on this one. Fleische saw what was happening and brought his black gelding up from the other side. Together the troopers sjamboked the Hottentot on the buttocks and thighs, forcing him into a queer little dance. It took a certain talent to make a prisoner dance that way without slowing down the rest of the trek because of the way they were all chained together. They were doing quite well until through some stupid misjudgment, Fleische's sjambok caught in the chain and he was pulled from his horse and under the feet of the prisoners.

Their reflexes are fast, they're like animals. Before the other trooper had really taken it in the fellow they'd been sjamboking leaped on Fleische, trying to get his bight of chain around Fleische's neck. The rest of the line, realizing through some extra sense what had happened - anticipating murder - had come to a halt.

Fleische managed to roll away. The two of them got the key from the sergeant, unlocked and removed their Hottentot from the trek, and brought him off to the side. After Fleische, with the tip of his sjambok, had had the obligatory sport with the black's genitals, they clubbed him to death with the butts of their rifles and tossed what was left behind a rock for the vultures and flies.

But as they did this thing - and Fleische said later that he'd felt something like it too - there came over him for the first time an odd sort of peace, perhaps like what the black was feeling as he gave up the ghost. Usually the most you felt was annoyance; the kind of annoyance you have for an insect that's buzzed around you far too long. You have to obliterate its life, and the physical effort, the obviousness of the act, the knowledge that this is only one unit in a seemingly infinite series, that killing this one won't end it won't relieve you from having to kill more tomorrow, and the day after, and on, and on . . . the futility of it irritates you and so to each individual act you bring something of the savagery of military boredom, which as any trooper knows is mighty indeed.

This time it wasn't like that. Things seemed all at once to fall into a pattern: a great cosmic fluttering in the blank, bright sky and each grain of sand, each cactus spine, each feather of the circling vulture above them and invisible molecule of heated air seemed to shift imperceptibly so that this black and he, and he and every other black he would henceforth have to kill slid into alignment, assumed a set symmetry, a dancelike poise. It finally meant something different: different from the recruiting poster, the mural in the church and the natives already exterminated - sleeping and lame burned en masse in their pontoks, babies tossed in the air and caught on bayonets, girls approached with organ at the ready, their eyes filming over in anticipated pleasure or possibly only an anticipated five more minutes of life, only to be shot through the head first and then ravished, after of course being made aware at the last moment that this would happen to them - different from the official language of yon Trotha's orders and directives, different from the sense of function and the delightful, powerless languor that are both part of following a military order that's filtered like spring rain down countless levels before reaching you; different from colonial policy, international finagling, hope of advancement within the army or enrichment out of it.

It had only to do with the destroyer and the destroyed, and the act which united them, and it had never been that way before. Returning from the Waterberg with von Trotha and his staff, they came upon an old woman digging wild onions at the side of the road. A trooper named Konig jumped down off his horse and shot her dead: but before he pulled the trigger he put the muzzle against her forehead and said, "I am going to kill you." She looked up and said, "I thank you." Later, toward dusk, there was one Herero girl, sixteen or seventeen years old, for the platoon; and Firelily's rider was last. After he'd had her he must have hesitated a moment between sidearm and bayonet. She actually smiled then; pointed to both, and began to shift her hips lazily in the dust. He used both.

When through some levitation he again found himself on top of the bed, Hedwig Vogelsang was just entering the room astride a male Bondel who crawled on all fours. She wore only a pair of black tights and had let her long hair down.

"Good evening, poor Kurt." She rode the Bondel as far as the bed and dismounted. "You may go, Firelily. I call it Firelily," she smiled at Mondaugen, "because of its sorrel skin."

Mondaugen attempted a greeting, found himself too weak to talk. Hedwig was slithering out of the tights. "I made up only my eyes," she told him in a decadent whisper: "my lips can redden with your blood as we kiss." She began making love to him. He tried to respond but the scurvy had weakened him. How long it went on he didn't know. It seemed to go on for days. The light in the room kept changing, Hedwig seemed to be everywhere at once in this black satin circle the world had shrunk to: either she was inexhaustible or Mondaugen had lost all sense of duration. They seemed wound into a cocoon of blond hair and ubiquitous, dry kisses: once or twice she may have brought in a Bondel girl to assist.

"Where is Godolphin," he cried.

"She has him."

"O God . . ."

Sometimes impotent, sometimes aroused despite his lassitude, Mondaugen stayed neutral, neither enjoying her attentions nor worrying about her opinion of his virility. At length she grew frustrated. He knew what she was looking for.

"You hate me," her lip quivering unnaturally as a forced vibrato.

"But I have to recuperate."

In through the window came Weissmann with his hair combed in bangs, wearing white silk lounging pajamas, rhinestone pumps, and black eyeholes and lips, to steal another oscillograph roll. The loudspeaker blithered at him as if it were angry.

Later Foppl appeared in the door with Vera Meroving, held her hand, and sang to a sprightly waltz melody: I know what you want, Princess of coquettes: Deviations, fantasies and secret amulets.

Only try to go Further than you've gone If you never want to live to see another dawn.

Seventeen is cruel, Yet at forty-two, Purgatory fires burn no livelier than you.

So, come away from him, Take my hand instead, Let the dead get to the task of burying their dead; Through that hidden door again, Bravo for '04 again; I'm a Deutschesudwestafrikaner in love . . .

Once mustered out, those who stayed either drifted west to work at mines like the Khan or homesteaded their own land where the farming was good. He was restless. After doing what he'd been doing for three years a man doesn't settle down, at least not too quickly. So he went to the coast.

Just as its own loose sand was licked away by the cold tongue of a current from the Antarctic south, that coast began to devour time the moment you arrived. It offered life nothing: its soil was arid; salt-bearing winds, chilled by the great Benguela, swept in off the sea to blight anything that tried to grow. There was constant battle between the fog, which wanted to freeze your marrow, and the sun: which, once having burned off the fog, sought you. Over Swakopmund the sun often seemed to fill the entire sky, so diffracted was it by the sea fog. A luminous gray tending to yellow, that hurt the eyes. You learned soon enough to wear tinted glasses for the sky: If you stayed long enough you came to feel it was almost an affront for humans to be living there at all. The sky was too large, the coastal settlements under it too mean. The harbor at Swakopmund was slowly, continuously filling with sand, men were felled mysteriously by the afternoon's sun, horses went mad and were lost in the tenacious ooze down along the beaches. It was a brute coast, and survival for white and black less a matter of choice than anywhere else in the Territory.

He'd been deceived, that was his first thought: it wasn't to be like the army. Something had changed. The blacks mattered even less. You didn't recognize their being there in the same way you once had. Objectives were different, that may simply have been all. The harbor needed dredging; railroads had to be built inland from the seaports, which couldn't thrive by themselves any more than the interior could survive without them. Having legitimized their presence in the Territory the colonists were now obliged to improve what they had taken.

There were compensations, but they were not the luxuries army life had offered. As Schachtmeister you got a house to yourself and first look at girls who came in from the bush to surrender. Lindequist, who'd succeeded von Trotha, had canceled the extermination order, asking all the natives who'd fled to return, promising that no one would be hurt. It was cheaper than sending out search expeditions and rounding them up. Because they were starving out in the bush, promises of mercy included promises of food. After being fed they were taken into custody and sent out to the mines, or the coast, or the Cameroons. Their laagers, under military escort, arrived from the interior almost daily. Mornings he'd go down to the staging area and assist in the sorting-out. The Hottentots were mostly women. Among the few Hereros they got, the proportion was of course more nearly equal.

After three years of ripe, Southern indulgence to come upon this ash plain impregnated with a killer sea may have needed a strength not really found in nature: sustained necessarily by illusion. Not even whales could skirt that strand with impunity: walking along what served for an esplanade you might see one of the rotting creatures, beached, covered by feeding gulls who with the coming of night would be relieved at the giant carrion by a pack of strand wolves. And in a matter of days there would be left only the portals of great jaws and a picked, architectural web of bone, mellowing eventually to false ivory in the sun and fog.

The barren islets off Luderitzbucht were natural concentration camps. Walking among huddled forms in the evening, distributing blankets, food and occasional kisses from the sjambok, you felt like the father colonial policy wanted you to be when it spoke of Vaterliche Zuchtigung; fatherly chastisement, an inalienable right. Their bodies, so terribly thin and slick with cloud, lay drawn together to pool what marginal warmth was left to them. Here and there a torch of bound reeds soaked in whale oil hissed bravely in the fog. A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn't taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, aver on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindle-shaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.

And so, as you moved among them, you were forced to look at them as a collection: knowing from statistics that twelve to fifteen of them died per day, but eventually unable even to wonder which twelve to fifteen: in the dark they differed only in size, and that made it easier not to care as you once had. But every time the strand wolf howled across the water, as, perhaps, you were stooping down to examine a prospective concubine missed in the first winnowing, it was only by suppressing memories of the three years just passed that you kept from wondering if it was this particular girl the beast waited far.

As a civilian Schachtmeister drawing government pay this was one among many luxuries he'd had to abandon: the luxury of being able to see them as individuals. This extended even to one's concubines; one had several, some purely for housework, others for pleasure, domesticity too having become a massed affair. They were the exclusive possession of no one save the high-ranking officers. Subalterns, enlisted men and gangers like himself shared them out of a common pool, housed in a barbed-wire compound near the B.O.Q.

It was problematical who among the females had the better time of it in the way of creature comfort; the courtesans who lived inside the barbed wire or the workers who were housed in a great thorn enclosure nearer the beach. They had to rely on primarily female labor, there simply being, for obvious reasons, a severe shortage of males. They found the distaff side useful for a number of functions. Women could be inspanned to the heavy-duty carts to pull loads of silt dredged from the floor of the harbor; or to carry the rails for the road of iron being driven across the Namib toward Keetmanshoop. That destination naturally enough reminded him of the old days when he'd helped march blacks there. Often, under the hazed-out sun, he'd daydream; remembering water holes filled to the brim with black corpses, their ears, nostrils and mouths bejeweled green, white, black, iridescent with flies and their offspring; human pyres whose flames seemed to leap high as the Southern Cross; the frangibility of bone, the splitting-open of body sacs, the sudden heaviness of even a frail child. But here there could be none of that: they were organized, made to perform en masse - you'd have to supervise not a chained trek but a long double line of women, carrying rails with iron ties attached; if one woman fell it meant only a fractional increase in the force required per carrier, not the confusion and paralysis resulting from a single failure in one of the old treks. Only once could he remember anything like that happening, and it may have been because the fog and cold the previous week had been worse than usual, so that their sockets and joints may have become inflamed - that day his own neck ached and he had trouble turning it to see what had happened - but a sudden wail went up and he saw that one of the women had stumbled and fallen and brought the whole line down. His heart rose, the wind off the ocean turned balmy; here was a fragment of the old past, revealed as if by a parting in the fog. He went back to her, ascertained that the falling rail had broken her leg; dragged her out from under it without bothering to lift it, rolled her down the embankment and left her to die. It did him good, he thought; it took him temporarily away from nostalgia, which on that coast was a kind of despondency.

But if physical labor exhausted those who lived inside thorns, sexual labor could as easily fatigue those who lived inside steel. Some of the military had brought with them curious ideas. One sergeant, too far down the chain of command to rate a young boy (young boys being rare), did the best he could with pre-adolescent, breastless girls whose heads he shaved and whom he kept naked except for shrunken army leggings. Another made his partners he still, like corpses; any sexual responses, sudden breaths or involuntary jerks were reprimanded with an elegant jeweled sjambok he'd had designed for him in Berlin. So if the women thought about any of this at all there couldn't have been much to choose between thorns and steel.

Himself, he could have been happy in that new corporative life; could have made a career out of construction work, except for one of his concubines, a Herero child named Sarah. She brought his discontent to a focus; perhaps even became one reason finally why he quit it all and headed inland to try to regain a little of the luxury and abundance that had vanished (he feared) with von Trotha.

He found her first a mile out in the Atlantic, on a breakwater they were building of sleek dark rocks that the women carried out by hand, deep-sixed and slowly, painfully stacked into a tentacle crawling along the sea. That day gray sheets were tacked to the sky, and a black cloud remained all day at the western horizon. It was her eyes he saw first, whites reflecting something of the sea's slow turbulence; then her back, beaded with old sjambok scars. He supposed it was simple lust that made him go over and motion to her to put down the rock she'd begun to lift: scribble and give her a note for her compound supervisor. "Give it to him," he warned her, "or - " and he made the sjambok whistle in the salt wind. In earlier days you hadn't had to warn them: somehow, because of that "operational sympathy," they always delivered notes, even when they knew the note might well be a death warrant.

She looked at the chit, then at him. Clouds moved across those eyes; whether reflected or transmitted he'd never know. Brine slapped at their feet, carrion birds wheeled in the sky. The breakwater stretched behind them back to land and safety; but it could take only a word; any, the most inconsequential, to implant in each of them the perverse notion that their own path lay the other way, on the invisible mole not yet built; as if the sea were pavement for them, as for our Redeemer.

Here was another like the woman pinned under the rail, another piece of those soldiering days. He knew he didn't want to share this girl; he was feeling again the pleasure of making a choice whose consequences, even the most terrible, he could ignore.

He asked her name, she answered Sarah, eyes never having left him. A squall, cold as Antarctica, came rushing across the water, drenched them, continued on toward the north, though it would die without ever seeing the Congo's mouth or the Bight of Benin. She shivered, his hand in apparent reflex went to touch her but she avoided it and stooped to pick up the rock. He tapped her lightly on the rear with his sjambok and the moment, whatever it had meant, was over.

That night she didn't come. Next morning he caught her on the breakwater, made her kneel, placed his boot on her nape and pushed her head under the sea until his sense of timing told him to let her up for air. He noticed then how long and snakelike her thighs were; how clearly the musculature of her hips stood under the skin, skin with a certain glow, but finely striated because of her long fast in the bush. That day he'd sjambok her on any least pretense. At dusk he wrote out another chit and handed it to her. "You have an hour." She watched him, nothing about her at all of the animal he'd seen in other nigger women. Only eyes giving back the red sun, and the white stalks of fog that had already begun to rise off the water.

He didn't eat supper. He waited alone in his house near the barbed-wire compound, listening to the drunks selecting their mates for the night. He couldn't stay off his feet and perhaps he'd caught a chill. The hour passed; she didn't come. He walked out without a coat into low clouds and made his way to her thorn compound. It was pitch-black out. Wet gusts slapped his cheeks, he stumbled. Once at the enclosure he took up a torch and went looking for her. Perhaps they thought he was mad, perhaps he was. He didn't know how long he looked. He couldn't find her. They all looked alike.

The next morning she appeared as usual. He chose two strong women, bent her back over a rock and while they held her he first sjamboked, then took her. She lay in a cold rigor; and when it was over he was astonished to find that at same point during it the women had, like goodnatured duennas, released her and gone about their morning's labor.

And that night, long after he'd turned in, she came to his house and slid into the bed next to him. Woman's perversity! She was his.

Yet how long could he have had her to himself? During the day he manacled her to the bed, and he continued to use the woman-pool at night so he wouldn't arouse suspicion. Sarah might have cooked, cleaned, comforted, been the closest thing to a wife he'd ever had. But on that foggy, sweating, sterile coast there were no owners, nothing owned. Community may have been the only solution possible against such an assertion of the Inanimate. Soon enough his neighbor the pederast had discovered her and become enchanted. He requested Sarah; this was answered by the lie that she'd come from the pool and the pederast could wait his turn. But it could only get them a reprieve. The neighbor visited his house during the day, found her manacled and helpless, took her his own way and then decided, like a thoughtful sergeant, to share this good fortune with his platoon. Between noon and suppertime, as the fog's glare shifted in the sky, they took out an abnormal distribution of sexual preferences on her, poor Sarah, "his" Sarah only in a way that poisonous strand could never support.

He came home to find her drooling, her eyes drained for good of all weather. Not thinking, probably not having taken it all in, he unlocked her shackles and it was as if like a spring she'd been storing the additive force that convivial platoon had expended in amusing themselves; for with an incredible strength she broke out of his embrace and fled, and that was how he saw her, alive, for the last time.

The next day her body was washed up on the beach. She had perished in a sea they would perhaps never succeed in calming any part of. Jackals had eaten her breasts. It seemed then that something had at last been brought to consummation since his arrival centuries ago on the troop ship Habicht, that had only as obviousness and immediacy to do with the sergeant-pederast's preference as to women or that old bubonic plague injection. If it were parable (which he doubted) it probably went to illustrate the progress of appetite or evolution of indulgence, both in a direction he found unpleasant to contemplate. If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again, he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of his Firelily, the black corpse impaled on a thorn tree in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design for a world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate parables for, but a design whose first fumbling sketches he thought must have been done the year after Jacob Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach between Luderitzbucht and the cemetery was actually littered each morning with a score of identical female corpses, an agglomeration no more substantial-looking than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where the soul's passage was more a mass migration across that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone, from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple integration with the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single line of track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally, humanity was reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments he could almost believe was only Deutsch-Sudwestafrika's (actually he knew better), out of a confrontation the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make, humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor enemies, enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of rock, the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns; the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog.

IV.

"Kurt, why do you never kiss me any more?"

"How long have I been sleeping," he wanted to know. Heavy blue drapes had at some point been drawn across the window.

"It's night."

He grew aware of an absence in the room: located this eventually as an absence of background noise from the loudspeaker, and was off the bed and tottering toward his receivers before realizing he'd recovered enough to be walking at all. His mouth tasted vile but his joints no longer ached, gums no longer felt as sore or spongy. The purple spots on his legs had gone.

Hedwig giggled. "They made you look like a hyena."

The mirror had nothing encouraging to show hint. He batted his eyes at himself and the lashes of the left one promptly stuck together.

"Don't squint, darling." She had a toe pointed toward the ceiling and was adjusting a stocking. Mondaugen leered at her crookedly and began trouble-shooting his equipment. Behind him he heard someone enter the room and Hedwig begin to moan. Chains tinkled in the heavy sickroom air, something whistled and impacted with a loud report against what might have been flesh. Satin tore, silk hissed, French heels beat a tattoo against the parquetry. Had the scurvy changed him from voyeur to ecouteur, or was it deeper and part of a general change of heart? The trouble was a burned-out tube in the power amplifier. He replaced it with a spare and turned and saw that Hedwig had vanished. Mondaugen stayed alone in the turret for a few dozen visitations from the sferics, this being the only link remaining with the kind of time that continued to pass outside Foppl's. He was awakened from a light sleep by the sound of explosions to the east. When he finally decided to climb out the stained-glass window to investigate, he found that everyone had rushed to the roof. A battle, a real one, was in progress across the ravine. Such was their elevation that they could see everything spread out in panorama, as if for their amusement. A small group of Bondels huddled among some rocks: men, women, children and a few starved-looking goats. Hedwig inched her way across the roof's shallow slope to Mondaugen and held his hand. "How exciting," she whispered, eyes huger than he'd ever seen them, blood crusted on her wrists and ankles. Declining sunlight stained the bodies of the Bondels to a certain orange. Thin wisps of cirrus floated diaphanous in a late afternoon sky. But soon the sun had turned them blinding white.

Surrounding the besieged Bondels, in a ragged noose, were whites, closing, mostly volunteer except for a cadre of Union officers and noncoms. They exchanged occasional gunfire with the natives, who seemed to have only half-a-dozen rifles among them. Doubtless there were human voices down there, uttering cries of command, triumph, pain; but at this distance only the tiny pop-pop of gunshots could be heard. To one side was a singed area, streaked with the gray of pulverized rock and littered with bodies and parts of bodies which had once belonged to Bondels.