Daniel by Henning Mankell Read Free Book Online

his tent, Neka and one of the Consonants had vanished. They had taken large amounts of meat with them and half of the remaining water. For the first time he succumbed to a fit of rage and fired his revolver. He aimed straight at the sun and fired three times. The oxen grew restless but Amos managed to calm them. To avoid being abandoned in the middle of the desert, he took forceful measures that night. He tied both Amos and the other ox-driver to separate wagon wheels. He did it carefully and was surprised that they let him do it. Several times during the night he woke and dashed out of the tent because he was afraid they had got loose. But the men were sitting by the wheels, fast asleep.
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    He realised that the desert had already partially vanquished him. Now he no longer followed the maps: they went where the oxen led them. Soon the water and food would be gone. He took inventory and then wrote down a calculation in a letter to Matilda. The truth is now quite simple. If we don’t reach the trading post within ten days the journey will be over. My visit to the Kalahari Desert will then be finished. The question is whether I will have the courage to shoot myself or whether I will end up lying in the sand, being burned to death by the sun.
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    Apart from the beetle he had found only two other insects. A millipede that was close to twenty centimetres long, and a moth that lay dead next to the campfire one morning. He had identified both insects in his reference books. He forsaw that his museum would consist of these
three jars. Someone who might come across the wagon buried in the sand would wonder who the madman was who had wandered around in this hell collecting insects in glass jars from which the alcohol had long since evaporated.
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    He counted down the days. When they were three days from the end, when all the food and all the water would be gone, Amos came down with a high fever. For a day and a night they were forced to remain encamped. Amos was delirious, whimpering like a baby, and Bengler was sure that they would soon have the expedition’s first burial. But by morning his fever had vanished as quickly as it came.
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    They pressed on. Just before the midday rest the second ox-driver began waving excitedly and pointing towards a spot that lay west of their route. It took a long time before Bengler managed to understand what the ox-driver had seen. At first it seemed that the sand was only quivering. But then he saw that there was a clump of trees and some houses. He heard a horse whinny in the distance. The oxen replied with dull bellowing.
    At that instant he burst into tears. He turned away so that Amos and the other man would not see his weakness.
    After a while he pulled himself together, dried off the traces of tears and urged on the oxen. They were now heading in a different direction. For the first time he had a goal.
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    Long afterwards he would try to recall what he had thought or felt at the moment they discovered the houses and heard the horse whinny. But there was only a vacuum of relief.
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    A little before three in the afternoon they arrived.
    A man stood on the steps of the biggest house, waiting for them. He was missing two fingers on his right hand.
    In resounding Swedish he said that his name was Wilhelm Andersson.
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    For him there was no doubt that Hans Bengler was Swedish.
    No one but a Swedish shoemaker could have made leather boots as fine as those he was wearing.

CHAPTER 5
    Wilhelm Andersson welcomed Bengler warmly. His handshake was so powerful that it felt like he was trying to crush his hand. Then Andersson took off his shirt, turned his back, and asked Bengler to cut open a boil between his shoulder blades that was inaccessible to his own hands. Bengler stared at the distended boil and recalled the time he had fainted in the Anatomy Theatre. He stroked the scar above his eye.
    â€˜It’s probably best I don’t. I can’t tolerate the sight of