V.

"No, no." It had been a popular form of killing during the Great Rebellion of 1904-07, when the Hereros and Hottentots, who usually fought one another, staged a simultaneous but uncoordinated rising against an incompetent German administration. General Lothar von Trotha, having demonstrated to Berlin during his Chinese and East African campaigns a certain expertise at suppressing pigmented populations, was brought in to deal with the Hereros. In August 1904, von Trotha issued his "Vernichtungs Befehl," whereby the German forces were ordered to exterminate systematically every Herero man, woman and child they could find. He was about 80 per cent successful. Out of the estimated 80,000 Hereros living in the territory in 1904, an official German census taken seven years later set the Herero population at only 15,130, this being a decrease of 64,870. Similarly the Hottentots were reduced in the same period by about 10,000, the Berg-Damaras by 17,000. Allowing for natural causes during those unnatural years, von Trotha, who stayed for only one of them, is reckoned to have done away with about 60,000 people. This is only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good.

Foppl had first come to Sudwestafrika as a young Army recruit. It didn't take him long to find out how much he enjoyed it all. He'd ridden out with von Trotha that August, that inverted spring. "You'd find them wounded, or sick, by the side of the road," he told Mondaugen, "but you didn't want to waste the ammunition. Logistics at the time were sluggish. Some you bayoneted, others you hanged. Procedure was simple: one led the fellow or woman to the nearest tree, stood him on an ammunition box, fashioned a noose of rope (failing that, telegraph or fencing wire), slipped it round his neck, ran the rope through a fork in the tree and secured it to the trunk, kicked the box away. It was slow strangulation, but then these were summary courts-martial. Field expedients had to be used when you couldn't put up a scaffold each time."

"Of course not," said Mondaugen in his nit-picking engineer's way, "but with so much telegraph wire and so many ammunition boxes lying around, logistics couldn't have been all that sluggish."

"Oh," Foppl said. "Well. You're busy."

As it happened, Mondaugen was. Though it may have been only because of bodily exhaustion from too much partying, he'd begun to notice something unusual in the sferic signals. Having dexterously scavenged a motor from one of Foppl's phonographs, a pen and rollers and several long sheets of paper, the resourceful Mondaugen had fashioned a crude sort of oscillograph to record signals in his absence. The project hadn't seen fit to provide him with one and he'd had nowhere to go at his former station, making one up till now unnecessary. As he looked now at the cryptic pen-scrawls, he detected a regularity or patterning which might almost have been a kind of code. But it took him weeks even to decide that the only way to see if it were a code was to try to break it. His room became littered with tables, equations, graphs; he appeared to labor to the accompaniment of twitterings, hisses, clicks and carolings, but in reality he dawdled. Something kept him off. Events intimidated him: one night during another "typhoon" the oscillograph broke, chattering and scratching away madly. The difficulty was minor and Mondaugen was able to fix it. But he wondered if the malfunction had been quite an accident.

He took to roaming the house at odd hours, at loose ends. Like the "eye" in his dream of Fasching he now found he had a gift of visual serendipity: a sense of timing, a perverse certainty about not whether, but when to play the voyeur. A taming, possibly, of the original heat with which he'd watched Vera Meroving in the earlier days of the siege party. For example, leaning in bleak winter sunlight against a Corinthian column, Mondaugen could hear her voice not far away.

"No. Non-military it may be, but a false siege it is not."

Mondaugen lit a cigarette and peered around the column. She was sitting in the rockery with old Godolphin, beside a goldfish pool.

"Do you remember," she began. But then noticed perhaps the pain of a return home choking him more than any noose of memory she could provide, because she let him interrupt:

"I have done believing in siege as anything more than military technique. That was well over with twenty years ago, before even your beloved 1904."

Condescending, she explained that she'd been off in another country in 1904, and that a year and place don't have to include the physical person, for there to be a certain ownership.