August 8, 1998

The museum's trip left the hotel in Johannesburg before daybreak. The flight to Windhoek in Namibia requires passing from South Africa customs and being admitted by Namibia customs; thus airlines require a two-hour check-in before flight time. So we were raced out to the air terminal to stand among sleepy-eyed transits and pass in front of half-awake ticket agents to make a very short flight of one hour on Air Namibia.

After landing in Windhoek, we connected with a charter service to fly to a private airstrip in the Namib Desert. Look at the map along the Atlantic Coast of southwestern Africa to find this huge 100-mile wide and 1200-mile long desert. The desert is mainly in Namibia. Namibia, before winning independence, was German West Africa. Perhaps the best landmarks are the big diamond mines down against South Africa. Students tend to pay attention to the sites of gold and diamond mines. Sheep and cow ranching regions are the forgotten lands.

From the air, the landscape looked like red clay mountains. The pilot made a six-word seat belt announcement at take-off. I rode in the front seat of the plane, but flying over a huge desert, any questions I had about foothills or mountains could be postponed until after the plane taxied to a stop. A lady sitting in the back seat, noting my dilemma, sent up a note explaining that the mountains were sand dunes, the tallest in the world. She added what I thought was a bit terse and personal notation for such a short acquaintance: "To see and climb sand dunes is why we are going to the Namib Desert, Monte."

Once unloaded from the plane, 11 of us mounted an open-top white Dodge-looking safari wagon that refused to start. Drivers of other vehicles roared around vying for position to pull or push the old crate off, depending on direction of approach. The baggage truck, driven by a girl, spun in against the front bumper and pitched our driver a towrope. She jerked so hard the front wheels straightened and the motor backfired through an open exhaust system with a loud bang.

Racing single file, the vehicles tore off across terrain much like the alkali flats west of the Pecos River in Texas, to a complex of thatched roof adobe structures called Kulala Lodge. Are such foolhardy races the reason St. Christopher medals cut marks in sweaty hands? A porter talked me down from the safari vehicle by saying, "Steady, old fellow, she stands still without a driver." Waiters passed around ice tea, but my hand shook too much to hold a glass to my mouth.

The sleeping area of the guest tents was built on a wooden platform and covered by a roof of thatch to insulate against the extreme temperatures of the desert. Adjacent was the bathroom of the same clay as the big dining room and reception. By keeping the flaps closed during the day, the thick wall cooled the cot closest to the door for naps. In the night, the bathroom was closed off to hold a reasonable temperature for dressing in the morning. All the power was from solar panels. Bathing, after walking in the sand, was so luxurious, I don't recall caring whether the water was hot. Shaving was no challenge as I let my beard grow where mirrors and poor lighting viewed through bifocals make using a razor dangerous.

The Nambib Naukluft National Park is a one-hour drive from the lodge. (Cut 10 minutes off the time for each year the driver is below 20 years of age.) The park entrance rents spaces for campers and affords a very modest store for fuel and supplies. The road leads into an enormous flood plain, bordered on each side by red and golden dunes sloping off into swirls and waves of sand, reminiscent of modern paintings.

Here lives the most unusual creatures. Beetles that stand on their heads at night to catch the dew dripping into their mouths; long-legged beetles who use the elevation to hold their bodies off the hot sand; shovel-nosed lizards capable of swimming underneath the sand. The same fellows raise their tails and front legs to dance across the hot spots. Also, impalas, a small antelope, able to postpone parturition as long as two weeks to wait for rain. And not to leave out the side-winding puff adders, who drink the water collecting on their scales in the night.

But the most miraculous of all is the oryx, a long-horned antelope. He has a special blood vessel close to his brain to cool his blood. He can live in temperatures reaching 135 degrees Fahrenheit, like no other mammal in the world.

This characteristic also develops in humans living on the desert. One cocky matriarch of hiking clubs and library societies, along on the trip from Tucson, Arizona, lost her bag in an inexcusable mix-up at the hotel. On a later occasion, passing through U.S. customs in Miami, a drug sniffing Beagle dog barked at her backpack. Her face flushed at each challenge; nevertheless, she is bound to have had a blood coolant to keep her temper under such trying circumstances.