Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
his lungs with their own air constantly while he was rushed back along these twisting canyons, in the
dark, out along the bush tracks to the nearest village and then on and on to a town that perhaps had a
hospital, he might survive without too much brain damage. Zebra snakes don't even need to bite you.
They are called spitting cobras for a reason. Normally they are excessively shy, but when aroused they
can spit their cytotoxic venom six feet or more. This one was clearly aroused, and Paul hastily rolled
up his window.
The snake topic in the passenger door of Paul's Toyota contains many lurid pictures. Alongside the
featured snakes from southern Africa, you can see the human effects of their venom: rotten arms, legs
and hands, attached to bodies with pained, hopeless faces; limbs and torsos with puncture points sur-
rounded by skin that is black, blue, yellow, swollen, pitted and blotched. “Don't read the snake topic,”
Paul says to every newcomer, to first-time field workers and naïve young graduate students. “It will
only give you nightmares.” Everybody immediately opens the topic and stares.
You are told, when you first come to Namibia, never to unroll your sleeping bag until the very last
minute, just before you climb in. Each morning, when you wriggle out of the bag, you immediately
bind it into a tight bundle. Everybody knows about the sleeping bag left unrolled at Khorixas rest camp
by an unwary student, about the zebra snake that slid inside during the day and was there waiting for
him when he retired to his tent. He survived, just, since he was relatively close to town. When you're
camping out in the remoter parts of the Namibian desert, you don't need to hear this story twice.
Paul refuses to be worried by the Namibian snakes. He says that they're shy, rare and usually more
than happy to avoid him. In all his years working in Namibia, he's encountered only one other serious
snake—a black mamba, the most aggressive and deadly of all the ones in Paul's gruesome topic. Even
then, Paul didn't see it himself. And the geologist who did disturb it from its rock barely had time to
gasp before the snake had vanished.
Thanks to the lack of open water, there's little else to worry about. Except, that is, for the desert
elephants. They can dig for water. By using their tusks to create wells and waterholes, they can sur-
vive in some of the slightly less parched parts of the desert—the Huab River, for instance, towards the
Namibian coast, where water is relatively easy to come by. Though the riverbed is dry, ground water
lies not far below, and the surroundings are unusually verdant. Pungent African lilies poke up through
the sand, surrounded by unexpected pockets of green. There are spiky euphorbia bushes and stands of
mopane trees and twisted acacias.
The elephants in the Huab needn't be a problem. Paul has often camped there. Unlike, say, Canadi-
an bears, you can easily discourage elephants from visiting camp. Though the riverbed, which makes
a perfect campsite, is also a highway for elephants, they prefer to take the shortest, easiest route on
their nocturnal journeys. Pitch camp on the wide part of a bend, and they will generally leave you
alone. Even when they occasionally do wander around a field camp at night, they tend to be respectful
and disturb nothing. The next morning, you simply wake to see their giant prints in the sand—ridged
ovals the size of serving platters, or snowshoes, XXL. Paul isn't bothered by elephants any more than
he is by snakes, or than he was by the flies and bears in Canada. Though they're dangerous, he says,
elephants also tend to be shy. But they get angry when aroused. When I went to the Huab, I quickly
found this out.
T
HE TUSKS
were the first thing I saw—short, white and wicked. Then the rest of the elephant's head
took shape against a backdrop of dusty acacia leaves. Tiny eyes set in a creased, anxious forehead.
