Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
him. The front seat of his truck was perpetually wedged with bags of sugar and tobacco to offer to the
locals. He learned his first halting words of Afrikaans, how to say “please” and “thank you” and ask
directions. Around those villages, it was easy to get lost. The ground had been grazed bare of dried
grass and there was only baked mud, rutted with myriad tracks from animals and carts and, occasion-
ally, the tyres of vehicles like Paul's dusty white Toyota. Everyone wanted to help. When Paul said
thank you, the villagers would reply “Pleasure!” in a lilting, cheerful tone. If there was nobody to ask
for directions, Paul would sometimes have to cast back and forth, trying this track and that until he
finally found one that seemed to be heading the right way. Sometimes the tracks disappeared com-
pletely, and Paul had to divert down narrow gullies, setting his vehicle pitching and yawing over the
rocks, three wheels on the ground, one in the air.
He had never worked using a vehicle before. In Canada, everything was by planes and helicopters,
boats and boots. In Africa, he had to learn how to cut across a dried-out riverbed without getting
trapped with his wheels spinning helplessly in the soft sand. The tricks, he discovered, were to let air
out of the tyres until they were half-flat and could grip the loose surface more easily, and never, ever
to touch the brake in mid-sand.
Gradually the memories of Canada began to recede, and Paul found himself relishing the harsh
aridity of the African landscape: the sweeping valleys, the narrow, winding canyons and the disdainful
kicks of the springboks that bounced out of the way of the Toyota. Though he would never deviate
from his geology for anything approaching a tourist activity, he grew to enjoy seeing African wildlife
in the wilderness, where it belonged. Sometimes as he drove he would see ostriches, their short tails
bouncing as they jogged through the bush. He saw giraffes with their black velvet eyes and absurdly
long lashes (“the most beautiful eyes in the world”); grumbling warthogs and baboons, herons and
bustards and African grey parrots whose monotonous “waaah, waaah” sounded like a whining child.
In the air there was a flash of yellow as a southern masked weaverbird emerged from its dangling sack
of dried grass and mud. On the ground, termite nests towered, with their turrets and tubes and demonic
spires, all vivid red from the rusty Namibian soil.
And there were rocks and rocks and more rocks, all unstudied and enticing. North of Windhoek
rose the great pink granite intrusion of the Brandberg, Namibia's highest mountain, flanked with flat-
topped, chocolate-coloured hills. These were the remnants of a plume of hot rock that had risen up
from inside the Earth some 133 million years ago, when South America and Africa were last con-
joined. The plume had flooded angry lava on to the plains of both continents, helping to rip them apart
and open up the South Atlantic Ocean. Even the soil thereabouts was magma-dark, barely covered
with a pale blond beard of grass. There were no bushes or trees, just squat
Welwitschia mirabilis
plants, with a woody root from which sprouted two flat, flailing leaves. Each plant is miraculously
long-lived. Its leaves grow slowly and steadily, corkscrewing around each other for hundreds, perhaps
even thousands, of years.
Farther north still, the Precambrian outcrops emerged from beneath the volcanic floods. When
these rocks formed, more than 600 million years ago, Namibia was covered with a broad, shallow
sea that left behind sandstones and mudstones, pink carbonates and dark grey shales. Peering closely
at these rocks, Paul found the thumbprint whorls of the ancient stromatolites that had inhabited the
Precambrian shores; he found sand dunes, beaches and lagoons, all now petrified and awaiting his
notebook and hammer. And where the ancient seafloor once dipped towards a western ocean, barren,
rocky hills stretched for mile after mile, their layers in places magnificently buckled and twisted into
vast folds that dwarfed the tiny Toyota as it jolted along the canyon floors.
