Impossible Places

  I was later astonished to discover that these giants of the genre, whom I had always envisioned climbing un-scalable mountains and hacking their way through impenetrable jungles, rarely went anywhere or did any such thing, with but few exceptions. I was immensely disappointed, because all I had ever dreamed of was visiting such impossible-to-get-to places like my hero, Sir Richard Francis Burton. Oddly enough, over the past third of a century or so, I’ve actually been able to do so.

  This story is about one such real impossible place. To get there, fly to the Kunene River, which forms the border between Namibia and Angola, hop in your Land Rover, head south—and keep your eyes peeled.

  “But I could swear I heard singing last night!”

  Matthew Ovatango scratched the place on his forehead where his short, tightly kinked hair began as he gazed out across the night-swept vastness of Kaokoland. They had camped in the shadow of a smooth hillock of gray granite that very much resembled a gigantic ball of elephant dung. Beyond the battered but indestructible Land Rover lay the immense reaches of the Hartmann Valley. Sere yellow grass carpeted the endless plain. Not far to the west, the southern Atlantic Ocean gnawed remorselessly at the lonely sands of the Skeleton Coast.

  The nearest town, if such it could be called, was Opuwo, a two-hundred-kilometer drive to the east over a barely detectable dirt track. In these barren reaches survived few trees, and fewer people. Howard had come, deliberately and with photography aforethought, to one of the most godforsaken corners of the Earth in search of solitude and marketable photos. Thus far the latter consisted entirely of landscapes. No one lived in this lonely corner of Namibia except a few wandering Himba and their cattle.

  So how could he have heard singing in the chill and perfect night?

  “Perhaps it was a pied crow.” His guide stirred the fading fire with a stick. The bark of Bushman’s candle collected earlier in the day flared briefly at the fringes, the waxy exoskeleton of that remarkable plant perfuming the night air as it burned.

  Rising, Howard turned to gaze into the darkness. Half a moon transformed the nearby inselberg, a mountain of sculpted granite boulders like the one beneath which they were camped, into a fantastic imaginary fortress. It reminded him of the massive walls of Sacsahuaman, the plundered Inca fortress above Cuzco, in Peru.

  But this was only a pile of rocks. The people who had first inhabited this land had raised up nothing more elaborate than crude, temporary huts of shattered rock and reed, of straw and mud and cow dung.

  He was turning back to the fire when he heard it again. This time he whirled sharply and took a couple of quick steps away from the crackling blaze. “Don’t tell me you didn’t hear that! Your ears are sharper than mine, Matthew.”

  The guide eyed him appraisingly. “A pied crow, Mr. Howard, sir. If you trust my ears, then trust my words.”

  The photographer strained to hear more. “That cry wasn’t like any crow call I’ve ever heard.”

  “And the pied crow most likely isn’t like any crow you’ve ever seen, either, sir.” Patiently the guide stirred the pulsing embers, cajoling them to renewed life. “You sit yourself down and get warm, sir. Tomorrow we will drive down toward the Hoarusib and look for the desert elephants.”

  Howard let his glance linger a moment longer on a landscape that seemed to fade away into the stars. Then he disappeared into the tent. Moments later he reemerged with electric torch, canteen, and camera.

  Ovatango’s lips tightened in the soft glow from the fire. “You shouldn’t leave camp, sir. Especially at night. Easy to get lost here.”

  “I know what I’m doing, Matthew.” Howard slung the camera strap over his neck, hooked the canteen to his belt. “I’ve done plenty of night photography in strange places, just last month in Etosha. I can always follow the fire back to camp. Get some rest yourself. You’re going to be doing a lot of driving tomorrow.”

  “This isn’t Etosha, sir. This is the Skeleton Coast. Etosha is civilized country compared to here. There is a reason for its name, you know. Just last year two men illegally prospecting for diamonds on the Coast got lost. They had been here before, they ‘knew’ the country, and they were well equipped. A private plane spotted their Land Rover, and a government patrol came out to look for them.

  “They had become lost in the fog and driven around in circles. When their radio didn’t work they tried to walk out. It took two weeks to find the bodies. The jackals and hyenas had been at them.”

  “Don’t worry about me.” Howard started off in the direction of the looming inselberg. “I’m not afraid of hyenas.” He grinned. “Maybe I’ll catch the sunrise from the top of the rocks. I like being on my own, Matthew.”

  The guide didn’t smile back. “No one comes to this place who doesn’t, sir. Please be careful. You are my responsibility. I am not worried about you meeting a hyena. But what if you step on a horned adder or a dancing white lady?”

  Howard kept his eyes on the circle of ground illuminated by the flashlight. “I won’t be climbing any dunes, Matthew. This is all rock and gravel here. And a dancing white lady,” he added, speaking of the ghostly white tarantula of the Namib sands, “would be more frightened of me than I of it.”

  The fire didn’t shrink behind him so much as it was swallowed up. The immense dark stones that he soon found himself scrambling among all looked exactly alike, sleek and rounded as if polished in some titanic gem tumbler. There were no trees, of course, not even a salt bush. Only by the sand rivers could trees find enough subterranean water with which to sustain themselves.

  The shifty weight of his canteen was a reassuring presence on his hip. The damp chill of night would give way to the rising heat of early morning. He found himself slowing, the guide’s words shadowing his thoughts. What if the fog did advance this far inland tonight? The famous mists of the Namib could instantly reduce visibility to zero. No fire could light a way through it back to camp. Furthermore, there was no water to be found in this country for a hundred kilometers in any direction, from the Kunene River up on the Angolan border to Cape Frio camp—and maybe not water there, either.

  But the night was crystal clear, the stars devoid of flicker, and though his athletic years were behind him, he felt confident he could outjog an advancing fog, even on unfamiliar terrain.

  It was the lack of landmarks that gave pause. Even in broad daylight it was easy to get disoriented out here. Many did, and many died. He dug in his pocket and relaxed a little. It was unfair of him not to have shown Ovatango the luminous compass, but it would be amusing to see the guide’s face when he strode confidently back into camp.

  He was ascending now, using the pale starlight to find his way. Here he had to be extra careful. A deceptively gentle, smoothly weathered ascent could terminate abruptly in a sheer drop of a hundred meters or more. Sand whispered under his hiking shoes, each step a small voice telling him to shush, shush, as if the land itself were admonishing him to respect the unparalleled silence and solitude.

  He thought he must be nearing the summit when moonlight suddenly broke through the rocks off to his left. There was an opening there, and he turned toward it. Over a black granitic curve that bowed up into the sky like a black clavicle he trod, then down, down into a frozen stream of sand, and up once again.

  Then he stopped, his lips parting in wonder. It was not a gap, a break in the rocks he’d come upon, but an arch. An absolutely lunatic geological phenomenon.

  He’d seen many natural arches before, and photographed them. In the American Southwest, in Australia, in Morocco. Always they were fashioned of sandstone, the rock easily eroded through by the wind. But he was not looking at sandstone now. He stood within a garden of solid, impermeable granite.

  The Namib was the oldest desert in the world, and the wind here had had eons in which to work. No more than seven or eight feet high at its maximum, the opening in the rock was longer than a football field, tapering in height to mere inches at either end. The bridge of rock itself was fifty or six
ty feet thick and at least as broad, a sleek-flanked rope of black stone flung by the hand of a perverse geology across the crest of a low hill. The result was a long window in which a man could stand with his head scraping the rock ceiling while gazing out across an endless flat valley. Moonlight bathed the horizonless reaches in pale silver.

  His fingers throbbed from gripping the camera too tightly. He let it hang from the sturdy strap and rest against his chest. There was no way he could capture the phenomenon spread out before him at night. Photography would have to wait for daylight, and a wide-angle lens. Very wide.

  Then he heard the singing again, and knew despite Ovatango’s disclaimers that it did not arise from the throat of any crow that had ever lived.

  Crouching without knowing why, he advanced toward the upper end of the fantastic arch. As he ascended the slight slope, a figure strode unexpectedly into view. He froze, watching and listening. So mesmerizing was the unexpected sight that not once did he think of his camera. For Howard, this was unprecedented.

  The woman was short, no more than five feet tall, and naked save for a modest strip of cloth that encircled her loins. Her skin was not black, but a very beige or dried-apricot color. Her black hair was cut short in a neat crewcut, and her eyes were almond-shaped. Though she looked almost Mongolian, he knew she was not. He had seen her people before, though more often in the southern part of the country.

  She had a beautiful voice, though he recognized neither her words nor the language from which they sprang.

  Arms outstretched, she was half singing, half chanting. At first he thought she was singing to the moon, but she was too far beneath the arch for that indolent disc to be visible from where she stood. She had to be singing to the rock itself. Or to something on the rock.

  The song stopped, the delicate hands lowered, and suddenly she was looking straight at him. She made no move to cover her nudity, nor did she seem in the least afraid of him. This too was typical of her people, who from his brief acquaintance he knew to be bold and confident.

  “Hello, big darling. You have found me out, so you might as well come up here.” Her English was rich and supple, as if she were pronouncing every vowel with her whole throat.

  He hesitated, wondered why he was hesitating, and then resolutely climbed up to stand beside her. She had taken a seat on the curved floor of the arch. Feeling it was the polite thing to do, he crossed his legs and sat down next to her. Despite her seminudity she gazed back at him openly, frankly. The smooth skin of her breasts hovered beneath the slim arms she rested on her knees, their sleek curves mimicking that of the rock itself.

  “I heard you singing. My guide didn’t want me to come.”

  “But you are a man who does not like to be told what he can and cannot do. I like that.”

  He coughed gently, the cold invading his throat. “You’re very direct.”

  “It is a characteristic of my people.”

  “You’re San?”

  “No. Khoikhoi, or as most people say today, Nama. The Bushmen-San are very close to us.” For the first time since he’d sat down, her eyes left him, to question the darkness from which he’d emerged. “Your guide is not Nama.”

  “No. Herero.”

  “Ah. That explains it. A Nama guide would not have brought you anywhere near here. This place is sacred to the Khoikhoi. Only a very few know of it. My grandfather was one who did. Also,” she added with a startlingly white smile, “the Herero and the Nama do not get along. It goes back a long ways, and has a lot to do with cattle.”

  He smiled back. “Trouble in Africa often does.”

  “You are an interesting man, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Howard. Howard Cooperman. My friends call me Howie.”

  “Howie is too weak a name for this place. I will call you Howard.”

  “Your English is very good. Surely you don’t live around here?”

  “No one does. Only memories live in this place. I am an accountant for the First National Bank of Windhoek.” She waved a hand toward the southeast. “That way.”

  “I know. Hundreds of miles of nothingness. That’s why I’m here. There aren’t many places left in the world where you can find real nothingness.”

  They were both quiet for a while then, sharing the kind of total silence Howard had only experienced before inside a cave. Not a bird called, not an insect chirped, not the muted roar of a distant aircraft disturbed the upper atmosphere. Civilization of any sort was very far away.

  “You want to know what I’m doing here, dressed like this. Or rather, undressed like this, singing on a rock in the middle of the night. But you’re too polite to ask.” She traced an outline on the bare rock. “I am singing praise songs. The old songs, which my grandfather taught me.”

  “It was very beautiful,” he told her. “You sing to the rock?”

  “No.” She giggled softly, and her laughter was like water in the desert. “Why sing to a rock? Look above you.”

  Tilting back his head, he brought the beam of the electric torch up—and his breath momentarily failed him.

  The underside of the arch was completely covered in the most exquisite primitive paintings he’d ever seen. Both the ancient Bushmen and their cousins the Khoikhoi had left such paintings all over Namibia and Botswana, planting pigment at sacred places throughout the Kalahari and Namib Deserts. Only weeks ago he’d spent several days photographing the most famous of them at Twyfelfontein.

  But this was grander, much grander. Everything had been executed on an overpowering scale. Their outlines incised into the rock and then filled with color, hundreds of animals paraded across a canvas of a million tons of flying granite. Pacing the great herds on either side were the famously fluid stick figures of the ancient hunter-gathers who had lived side by side among them.

  The animals and people and paintings dated from a time long ago when this part of southwest Africa was much wetter and lusher, when the people called the Strandlopers hunted oryx and springbok and impala on the beach, and rivers like the Secomib and Nadas still reached the sea. Ten thousand and more years ago, when the game and the grass had covered the land as far as the eye could see. Before the Namib took over this part of the continent and the South African army slaughtered what animals remained.

  “No one’s ever photographed this before.” He stood awestruck by the skill and accomplishments of the ancient painters. “I know: I would have seen pictures.” Despite the chill, his fingers were moist against the hard body of the camera.

  “No. You can be the first. Or—you can help me.”

  He blinked and turned back to her, the light flashing in her onyx eyes and making her turn away sharply.

  “Sorry.” He lowered the beam and then, on impulse, clicked it off.

  “Thank you.” In the shade of the arch she was a shadow herself now. “I need a man.”

  “You really are direct.”

  The bubbling laughter echoed again. “Not like that, though I wouldn’t refuse you. I need a man to dance for me. It has to be a man. The women sing the praises. The men dance.”

  “I don’t understand, but if you need a man to dance for you, why not one of your own people?”

  She leaned toward him. “Because they are all afraid.” The cold of the Namib night jumped suddenly closer, like a dancing white lady spider on the hunt.

  “What are they afraid of?”

  “They have been told that the old ways are wrong and that they must all become modern. I am modern; I have a good education and a modern job, but I also had a grandfather. He brought me to this place when I was a little girl, and showed me the dances, and because of him I was never afraid. My grandmother taught me the songs.

  “When I was old enough I started coming here as soon as I could get away. First from Gibeon, where I was born, then from Keetmanshoop where I went to school, and now from Windhoek, where I work. Sometimes a boy or a man would come with me, but they wanted to dance a different dance. Sometimes I danced with them, sometimes not.??
? Eagerness infused her voice.

  “You come from a far-off land. You have no fears of the old ways, no prejudices. You heard the singing and came of your own free will. I think you are special, Howard. Special to this place and special to me. If I sing, will you dance?”

  He shook his head. This was too bizarre. But if he could get her to pose for him in the morning, she would make a magnificent image, framed in the impossible arch with the great valley stretching out before her.

  “I’m not much of a dancer, Ms. . . . ?”

  She didn’t stand so much as flow to her feet. “I am Anna Witbooi. My grandfather was the greatest of the Khoikhoi elders, a direct descendant of Heitsi Eibib, who was the first of our people. I will sing the true praise songs and you will dance. I can show you the steps, but I cannot dance them myself. The women sing; the men dance.

  “First you must take off your clothes.”

  It seemed crass to be self-conscious in so pure a setting. He folded his clothes and laid them in a neat pile—all but his briefs, which she told him he could retain. It was cold, and he hoped he wouldn’t start shivering. The damp chill didn’t seem to bother her at all.

  “Like this.” Standing so close he could feel the warmth of her, she started to dance.

  The movements were simple and not impossibly precise. More of a rhythmic stamping and turning than anything else. All he had to do was keep time to the chanting.

  “All right,” he finally told her. “I’ll give it a try. Just don’t expect too much. But I want something in return. Tomorrow, when there’s light, I want to take some pictures of you.”

  “Yes.” She was teasing him. “Tomorrow you can take pictures of me.”