I had set off early that morning, the kind of departure that feels both hopeful and weary at once. By late afternoon, my leg had begun to cramp on the accelerator, and I’d wound down the window to keep myself awake. The warm air buffeted my face and made my eyes sting — they felt as though they’d been bobbing loose in their sockets all day.

In better times, I might have travelled in something with a touch more dignity, but a visit to Johannesburg earlier that year had put an end to such luxuries. My car had been stolen. Now I drove an old, weary VW Beetle — more rust than metal — that wheezed along the road like an asthmatic pensioner. The police eventually found the stolen car in a township outside the city, stripped bare, the interior gutted, the engine pillaged. The insurance company wrote it off, and the payout barely bought me a train ticket home.

By sunset, the Swartberg mountains blazed in a soft display of orange and gold. I decided to stop at the next petrol station and found myself just south of a small town called Colesberg, deep in the Karoo. The forecourt was deserted, the kind of quiet that feels almost watchful. I pulled up beneath an awning, climbed out, and stretched my legs. The dull ache in my calf reminded me of the day’s drive.

The Beetle, as usual, had its quirks. Fourth gear refused to stay put, so I’d secured it with a bungee cord, though even that required the crook of my leg to keep it from slipping loose. The fluorescent lights above the pumps buzzed in the silence, each one casting a halo that drew a swarm of giant moths. They pinged off the lamps like tiny bullets. The pumps stood at attention, two pale sentries waiting for orders, and the convenience store beyond them was dark — a flimsy Closed sign clinging to the glass door by a tired rubber sucker.

Somewhere nearby, an ice-cream board squeaked in the wind, the sound thin and forlorn. The air had a sharp bite to it, and I knew there’d be no comfort waiting in the Beetle. With no heater and nothing but a thin sleeping bag for warmth, it was going to be a long night. I slid across to the passenger seat, unrolled my sleeping bag, and reclined the seat as far as it would go. Plastic and polyester make for an uneasy partnership — I kept sliding off.

God, I’m going to freeze out here, I thought, switching off the overhead light. The windscreen was already misting, blurring the few scattered stars beyond. My mind drifted to my Ouma, who had once worked as a district nurse in this very region. She’d been forever on the road, visiting remote schools to check on the health of children — the “cough while I cup your nuts” kind of examination.

The Karoo had always fascinated me — a semi-arid desert where scrub and silence stretch to the horizon. The occasional sheep broke the monotony, or a jackal if it hadn’t already been crippled by a farmer’s bullet. The climate was merciless. In winter, frost glazed the ground and snow dusted the mountains; in summer, the heat pressed down like a punishment, and the rainfall was barely worth mentioning.

Flash floods and freak storms arrive out of nowhere and turn the desert into a torrent. The worst of them struck Laingsburg in 1981. That year, the land was bone dry, its tough skin repelling rain like oilcloth. When the heavens finally opened, the water ran straight into the Buffels River. At first, the rain was celebrated — even the hardiest sheep had been dying — but joy turned to terror when the Buffels burst its banks.

Three rivers — the Buffels, the Wilgehout, and the Baviaans — converged, sending a wall of water tearing through the town. It swept away everything: homes, bridges, the N1 motorway itself. Streets became waterways; people clung to rooftops as the torrent rose. Some of those rooftops gave way, and over a hundred souls were lost. Fifty were never found, buried beneath the silt of the Floriskraal Dam.

Only a few buildings survived, and one of them — miraculously, inevitably — was the church.

I thought about that as I lay there in my sleeping bag, the cold creeping up from the floor of the Beetle, the silence of the Karoo pressing in around me. It was a silence so thick it almost rang in my ears. My breath fogged the glass, and for a moment I imagined my Ouma’s car rolling through this same stretch of road decades before.

The night deepened, the stars burned brighter, and somewhere between the hum of the fluorescent lights and the creak of the station sign, I drifted into sleep — the desert holding its breath, waiting for morning.