A Twist of Sand

The Brandberg and Mount Colquhoun are the pickets of a great tumble of peaks, broken tablelands, sand-blasted plateaux, waterless river courses and gullies untrodden by man since the dawn of time which go to make up the Kaokoveld or, as it is more sinisterly known, the Skeleton Coast. This territory, without a river, a well, or surface water anywhere at all, is the size of England. It is closed to man, first, by Government decree because it is thought it may be rich in diamonds and a sudden access of the precious stones might upset world market prices; and, second, more than the decree, rigidly enforced, is the Kaokoveld's timeless, sleepless guardian -- thirst. And always at his back, death. Plenty of men have slipped across (lie forbidden border -- it is nowhere marked and I suppose the nearest to a frontier in the furnace-like world is in the south, the so-called Hoanib River. It never flows, although in its broad bed, glistening white like Muizcuteerg beach, water can be had for the digging. Elephants and antelope in its wild, untrodden places dig in the river bed and make their own wells. Man dies before he gets there. The adventurers and diamond-seekers who slip away in the night are never heard of again. Thirst and death claim them.

In its 50,000 square miles there may be one or two white men. I suppose the little wild Bushmen and their stranger cousins, the Strandlopers (Walkers on the Beach) do not number more than several thousands. The Strandlopers, whom some believe to be almost the lowest type of living man closest to the "missing link," wander eternally by the shore, never going far from the moving dunes whose sand rasps and tears the skin as it blows and shifts under the great sea-winds. They live on shellfish, dead seals and other creatures swept up by the huge rollers. Blacker than the tan-coloured Bushmen, the Strandloper has longer hair, matted with grease and sand. Their stink is worse than any wild animal. The offal of the sea they share with the lean jackals and hyenas which scavenge the desolate seashore engaged on the same relentless, unsatisfied quest as themselves.

The Skeleton Coast stretches from the Hoanib River in the south to the Cunene River in the north, the international boundary between South West Africa and Portuguese Angola. The territory is about 150 miles long and, at its broadest, opposite Cape Frio, about the same distance across, although the width is not maintained, particularly in the south. From the seaward side it looks like a huge cheetah's head, which faces south-east into the great sandy tracts which stretch eastwards towards the Kalahari Desert. For fifty miles from the mouth of the Cunene, it gapes like a shark's mouth, the wicked fangs jutting into the sea round Cape Frio and running backwards into a savage orifice of mountains which turn the north-eastern shores into a brutal amphitheatre of jagged rock, entered (if that were possible) from the seaward side by undulating, but steadily rising layers of dunes, like the velvet-soft membrane round a shark's lips, while behind them are the death-dealing fangs.

There is no port and, indeed, no seaward entrance to the Skeleton Coast, which well merits its name. The shore is littered with wrecks, from dhow to destroyer, from liner to clipper and New England whaler. The gigantic graveyard does not allow its corpses to rot. The dryness and the sand keep them indefinitely. Men, crazed by thirst, have come back to tell of old ships and treasure chests with dead men sitting round them as they have sat for centuries -- but no one risks his life or his sanity to go back, even if he could go legally. Permits to enter the Kaokoveld are given but rarely, and then under very exceptional circumstances. From the sea the Kaokoveld has sealed itself by means of huge rollers and fiendish sandbars.

From the landward side it is easier. The jeep has broken part of the Kaokoveld open. There is an airstrip where a light plane may land at Ohopoho, the administrative "capital "of the Skeleton Coast, where one unfortunate white official lives. There are negotiable tracks through some of the canyons for a jeep or a truck expertly driven, but these are merely the fringes. The whole vast area is for all intents and purposes a closed book. What secrets lurk in the mountains it is impossible to say. One thing is certain, however, the easy talk that Rhodesia might build a railway to the Atlantic is so much hot air. Tiger Bay, say the Rhodesians, is their "natural "port. As a sailor it seems to me that the precarious harbour, locked in by a sandy peninsula which juts into the South Atlantic simply would not be worthwhile. Safe enough in some winds, I can think of conditions when a liner would be as safe at anchor there as running blind among the sandbars of the Skeleton Coast. Like other railways in Africa, it would cost a life a fishplate laid.