A version of this story first appeared in the Sunday Times Travel Weekly
I searched for
Henno Martin’s hiding place. I drove
deep into the Naukluft region of the Namib Desert, the wilderness he called the
gramadoelas. A landscape of tightly
folded valleys, bent and twisted ravines and stingy scrub. A place where animals cling to a tenuous,
dry, desert life. An empty place which,
in the 1940s, had no roads and no maps and no reason for anyone to visit unless
they were looking for two German fugitives.
Martin and his
friend, Hermann Korn and their dog, Otto, hid here during the Second World
War. The two young geologists decided
that it would be better to spend the war hiding in the desert than be interned
as the enemy. Nobody knew when the war
would end, and anyway, it was a war the two friends wanted nothing to do with.
They hunted the
sparse game in the area with a Luger hand-gun, their hunting rifles having been
confiscated at the beginning of the war.
They learned, after many failures, to get close enough to the Gemsbok
and Zebra that were their primary quarry to kill them. In the quickly evaporating pools in the deep
shade of a gorge, they found a way to harvest fish. They tried, and failed, to plant a vegetable
garden. With a combination of resilience
and resourcefulness they survived for two years in an environment where failure
could mean death.
In his book
"The Sheltering Desert", Martin described this corner of Namibia as
somewhere "the devil had created in an idle hour...an impressive and
intimidating" place.
Somewhere between
the Kuiseb and Gaub passes I slowed the car expecting to pick up some sign, of where they built their shelter. Over the brow of a low pass, built years
after Martin’s adventure, I came upon a cairn.
Did this mark the spot? I parked and
looked down the slope. There was a path,
which I hoped would lead the way to the shelter. The barely discernable scraping in the gravel
braided several times and then petered out into the stony desert.
I looked back at
the car high above me on the road.
Below, the small gully dropped into a ravine which led into another,
forming a rocky and confusing labyrinth.
I followed the
gully and then scrambled to the ravine to where the deep shadows of afternoon
tempted me out of the heat. To continue
would be to lose sight of the car:
another turn this way and one that way and would I remember the way
back? I took a few more steps, hopping
onto rocks and sliding on stones and halted just before the car disappeared
from view. Down the ravine I could see
no order to the brokenness of the terrain, no obvious reference points: a maze in which to get lost, a place in which
to die. Martin, Hermann and Otto, who nearly
died after being gored by a gemsbok, survived somewhere near here until they
had to move, fearing that their hideout had been discovered. I wondered who might have discovered it in
this impenetrable place. I turned around
and trudged back up the slope.
Disappointed, I
drove on, slowly, scouring the rocky brown terrain for a sign of the hiding
place, hoping that I would notice a clue.
Like the authorities of the time, I never found the shelter of Henno
Martin and Hermann Korn. They chose
their hiding place well.
I continued on
towards the Gaub Pass hoping that perhaps the shelter was further along than I had
anticipated. As the horizon drew nearer
to the sun the shadows lengthened and the rocks softened from their bleached
harshness to a deepening red. It was
time to consider a camp site for the night.
I kept a look out for a sign pointing to accommodation and occasionally
I stopped the car to watch the bat eared foxes foraging next to the gravel
road. There were still a couple of hours
of light when I spotted a sign: The
Namib Valley Lodge and Camp Site. There
was a signal so I dialled the number on the board and the man, sounding a
little surprised, told me there were sites available. “Turn left from where you are and drive seven
kilometres. Then turn right and pass
through the gate when you see the notice board and keep going until you get
there.” He didn’t tell me that there was
another seven kilometres of jeep track to drive before we would reach our
destination. It was slow going but quite
beautiful as we climbed slowly up into the mountains. We startled a herd of zebra that then
cantered off ahead of us before cutting across the track and disappearing into
a kloof below.
When we arrived we
realised that we had found our own kind of hide-out in the Namib Desert. There was a solitary caretaker in
residence. I asked him for a camp-site
and he pointed in the direction of three small, thatched rondavels. Later we discover that, rustic on the outside,
the rondavels contained hot showers heated by their own individual solar panels,
immaculate private ablutions for each site.
Meanwhile, I gave up on conversation with the caretaker. Though quietly friendly, he was not a man for
small talk. Perhaps spending so much
time alone, surrounded by the almost incomprehensible vastness of the Namib
mountain-scape is what reduces his conversational needs to the essentials.
The roadside sign pointing
the way here had said “Namibia’s Valley of a Thousand Hills”. Below
us, beyond a lone quiver tree, stretches a scene that looks like the hide of a
giant elephant. A valley of a thousand
ravines hemmed by ranges of saw-toothed mountains.
As the fire burned
the hard thorn-wood, the cracked valleys below glowed like red embers in the
dying of another day. Martin and Korn
must have gazed at similar scenes during their time in the desert as they spent
long hours discussing their theories of life and the natural world. Whereas I have plenty of supplies in a cooler
full of ice and cold beer, the two fugitives had few luxuries. Hardly knowing where their next meal would
come from the men would often walk great distances in extreme heat through the
canyons and onto the plains, seeking out new waterholes where there might be
game to shoot.
Though I set out
to find the shelter, and although I had felt disappointed by my failure to
locate it, I feel a creeping satisfaction as the mystery lingers. A confirmation that the Namib is one of the
few wilderness areas left in the world, a place that can still keep its
secrets. Even though many people have
visited the old shelter, it remains hidden to those without detailed
directions.
The night claims
the view with a blackness unspoiled by artificial light and so I crawl into my
tent. As I draw myself down into my
sleeping bag I resolve to return one day, next time with the map co-ordinates,
to the place where the two courageous young adventurers successfully sought
refuge in this empty place from the collective madness that was World War Two.
