And when I woke up again the fires were almost dead. I got up and fetched more wood. It took me quite a while to wake Jan Ockerse, though. Because the veldskoens I was wearing were the wrong kind, and had soft toes. Eventually he sat up and rubbed his eyes; and he said, of course, that he had been lying awake all night. What made him so certain that he had not been asleep, he said, was that he was imagining all the time that he was chasing bluebottles amongst the stars.

“And I would have caught up with them, too,” he added, “only a queer sort of thing happened to me, while I was jumping from one star to another. It was almost as though somebody was kicking me.”

Jan Ockerse looked at me in a suspicious kind of way.

So I told him that it was easy to see that he had been dreaming.

When the fires were piled high with wood, Jan Ockerse again said that it was a funny night, and once more started talking about the stars.

“What do you think sailors do at sea, Schalk,” he said, “if they don’t know the way and there aren’t any other ships around from whom they can ask?”

“They have got it all written down on a piece of paper with a lot of red and blue on it,” I answered, “and there are black lines that show you the way from Cape Town to St. Helena. And figures to tell you how many miles down the ship will go if it sinks. I went to St. Helena during the Boer War. You can live in a ship just like an ox-wagon. Only, a ship isn’t so comfortable, of course. And it is further between outspans.”

“I heard, somewhere, that sailors find their way by the stars,” Jan Ockerse said, “I wonder what people want to tell me things like that for.”

He lay silent for a while, looking up at the stars and thinking.

“I remember one night when I stood on Annie Steyn’s stoep and spoke to her about the stars,” Jan Ockerse said, later. “I was going to trek with the cattle to the Limpopo because of the drought. I told Annie that I would be away until the rains came, and I told her that every night, when I was gone, she had to look at a certain star and think of me. I showed her which star. Those three stars there, that are close together in a straight line. She had to remember me by the middle one, I said. But Annie explained that Willem Mostert, who had trekked to the Limpopo about a week before, had already picked that middle star for her to remember him by. So I said, all right, the top star would do. But Annie said that one already belonged to Stoffel Brink. In the end I agreed that she could remember me by the bottom star, and Annie was still saying that she would look at the lower one of those three stars every night and think of me, when her father, who seemed to have been listening behind the door, came on to the stoep and said: ‘What about cloudy nights?’ in what he supposed was a clever sort of way.”

“What happened then?” I asked Jan Ockerse.

“Annie was very annoyed,” he replied, “she told her father that he was always spoiling things. She told him that he wasn’t a bit funny, really, especially as I was the third young man to whom he had said the same thing. She said that no matter how foolish a young man might be, her father had no right to make jokes like that in front of him. It was good to hear the way that Annie stood up for me. Anyway, what followed was a long story. I came across Willem Mostert and Stoffel Brink by the Limpopo. And we remained together there for several months. And it must have been an unusual sight for a stranger to see three young men sitting round the camp-fire, every night, looking up at the stars.