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I was somewhere between Matjiesfontein and Laignsburg, alone on the N1 with nothing but the Karoo for company, when I noticed I wasn't alone.
He was already in the passenger seat. The armour had left a small scratch on the headrest and he was holding his helmet in his lap with the careful dignity of a man who knows he is a guest and is trying to behave accordingly. Mostly.
I didn't ask how he got there. The Karoo is not a place that encourages certain kinds of questions.
We drove.
For the first twenty minutes he said nothing. He watched the landscape through the window. Then without warning, he sat forward.
"That one", he said, pointing.
I looked. A windpomp on a koppie. Turning slowly in a wind I couldn't feel. Behind it, a sky that had decided to be enormous today.
"It's a giant", he said quietly. "Do you see it?"
"Yes", I said.
He turned to me slowly. Not with the patient sorrow of a man expecting to be corrected, but something else. Something that had not had much opportunity to be itself lately.
"You see it", he asked again. "Really?"
"I run a secondhand bookshop", I said. "I see giants every day. Sometimes twice before breakfast."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he faced forward again, with the particular straightness of a man trying not to show that something has just reached him.
We drove on. The road was straight and the Karoo was doing what the Karoo does, which is to offer you an enormous amount of space and leave you entirely alone in it.
"And the others?", he asked eventually. "The ones who stand in the same field. What do they see?"
I kept my eyes on the road. "A windpomp, mostly", I said. "They nod. They move on. Sometimes, years later, something shifts. They're not always sure what to do about it."
He made a sound that was not quite a word. Something between recognition and old pain.
We passed a town that was really just a filling station with ambitions above its station. A dog watched us from a stoep with the philosophical detachment of an animal that has seen many cars and expects nothing from any of them.
"The giant", he said eventually, "does not appear on request. It appears to the one standing in the right field. At the right hour. In the right light."
"And if they're standing in a different field?" I asked.
"Then they see a windpomp", he said, without any particular drama. "That is not your failure. That is the nature of fields."
I thought about that for a while.
"Does it get easier?" I asked. "The falling off horses".
He was quiet long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer. Then: "You stop being embarrassed about the horse", he said. "That is not nothing."
Outside, another windpomp turned against the sky. I watched it for as long as I safely could.
"Still, you keep charging."
He looked at me. A long look, the kind that comes from a man who has thought about very little else for several centuries.
"What else would you do?" he said.
By Beaufort West he was asleep, helmet tilted, one gauntleted hand still pointing loosely at the horizon. I didn't wake him. Some passengers you just let sleep.
I had books to get back to. Giants, every one of them. Whether anyone else could see them or not.
PS. Don Quixote has been making people feel seen for four hundred years. Cervantes wrote a book about a man who saw giants. Most of the world saw windmills. The book is still here. So are the giants.
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