A Twist Of Sand

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.

All Africa's pent-up hatred of man, of his ways, the cities he has thrown up out of steel and concrete on the veld, of his roads and railways through which her wealth and secrets have been won, stands at bay, fangs bared against the last intrusion, here in this remote corner of the continent called the Kaokoveld. Round her skirts she has gathered the last untamed remnants of her once countless herds of antelope, giraffe, zebra, lion and elephant.

She stands at bay with her back to the wild sea and her face to the impregnable mountains. Man is puny against this concentrated might of Africa. The Matto Grosso is as well-known as Piccadilly compared to the Kaokoveld. Only a few of the men who dared to enter have ever lived to tell what they saw, and that has been little enough.

The bus was running more easily now on the hard desert road. When the winds blow, sand will cover the surface to a depth of a couple of feet within forty-eight hours. One of the principal expenses of roads — and railways — is the need to keep shifting the sand away from them, season after season. It is a stark reminder that if man's hand were taken away for only one year, there would be few traces of his occupation left. With the increased speed, the grains of sand spurted in the cracks of the steel floor, but fortunately the hot diesel fumes joined the swirling dust-cloud which marked our path towards Swakopmund.

Upon Mark and myself the Kaokoveld exercised its lure. Sitting in the jolting vehicle, my mind went back to the end of the previous winter. Mark and I had wished to make a trip northwards to the Cunene and return via the great mass of swamps and tributary channels which flow into the great lake of Etosha, probably the finest game reserve in the world, where one counts the buck in herds of thousands. There the elephants, homeward-bound across the sand-dunes, link trunk to tail in a "train "which may be a furlong long!