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 eves 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 von 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 Hereto 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.