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WONDERS OF NATURE
Skeleton Coast. Nature miracle
Namib, the coldest and most waterless desert of the world, stretches along the Atlantic coast of South Africa in a narrow one hundred-kilometer strip. Whatever names this region of the world has been called by lively journalists and authors of adventure novels: the Skeleton Coast, the Treasure Coast, the Coast of the Lost Ships, the Coast of the Mists, the Coast of the Giant Dunes ... And for each of these names the African desert gave enough reason. From the east, it is limited by the steep slopes of the Kaoko, Homas and other plateaus, and in the southeast, the Namib merges with the no less famous, although not so gloomy, Kalahari Desert. The latter, strictly speaking, is not a desert at all, but a deserted savanna that shelters huge herds of ungulates and packs of predators, as well as many birds. Rivers flow along it, springs gush in places, trees, shrubs and grasses grow in it, giving food to elephants and giraffes, zebras, ostriches and other inhabitants of it. A completely different matter is the Namib Desert, where only a few of the most adapted creatures can survive, and even then not everywhere.
The formation of a desert on the sea coast is due to two reasons: firstly, the east winds constantly blowing here - the trade winds, crossing the continent, lose their moisture on the steep slopes of the Drakensberg Mountains and over the high plateau of South-West Africa, so that Namib no longer gets rain; and secondly, the cold Antarctic Benguela Current, passing along the African coast to the north, cools the ocean waters, and with them the lower layer of the atmosphere. As a result, fogs form on the coast instead of rains. They stand above the desert up to 27 days a month and sometimes spread deep into the mainland for 50 kilometers. Most of the Namib is occupied by huge sand dunes, reaching three hundred meters in height. Nowhere else in the world are there such gigantic mountains of free-flowing sand. Above their peaks, you can almost always see plumes of sandy dust raised into the air, and it seems that the dunes are smoking like volcanoes. Closer to the ocean, dune ridges are white or yellowish in color, and further from the coast their color becomes darker, turning into fiery red. Only two rivers flowing along the northern and southern borders of the Namib Desert - Kunene and Orange - bring their waters to the Atlantic. All other channels of water streams remain dry for years. Only once every five or six years, after a particularly rainy wet season (it falls in May-September), flash floods roll through the valleys. In a day or two, or even in a few hours, they carry away the sand that has been accumulating in the channels for years to the ocean shore, where the wind is again mistaken for it. And menacing sandstorms again and again fall on the ridges of dunes, which, under the pressure of the winds, are constantly moving, filling up hollows and advancing on rare human settlements. At the height of summer, the temperature here does not even reach seventeen degrees Celsius, and in winter it drops to twelve. Sometimes there are night frosts. Precipitation, according to scientists, is less in Namibe than anywhere else: an average of two millimeters per year! Nevertheless, as soon as it rains (although this does not happen every year), the desert comes to life. Greenery appears in the valleys, butterflies circle above the flowers, here and there the voices of larks and finches are heard, and herds of oryx antelopes with long and straight, like spears, horns run along the slopes of the dunes. Dark beetles, which live only here, crawl among the grass. They perfectly managed to settle in a waterless and seemingly uninhabitable environment. In the absence of rain, the bugs can get drunk ... on fog. At night, they burrow halfway into the sand, leaving the back of the abdomen exposed. On long processes and brushes of hairs covering their paws, droplets of mist are collected, which then themselves flow down the abdomen into the beetle's mouth. With the help of the same brushes, the darklings glide over the sand like on skis. And on the crest of the dune you can meet small gecko lizards. Their toes are connected by a membrane, like those of our geese or ducks. This allows them to run on loose sands without falling through. The life of geckos, despite the speed of their movements, is full of dangers. Indeed, on the surface of the dunes, they are hunted by a secretary bird, and nimble meerkats, nicknamed earthen men for their habit of standing in columns near minks, and even a huge cerbalus spider. And the desert golden mole lies in wait for the lizards buried in the ground. This striking animal, covered with long and soft golden hair, spends its whole life in the thickness of the sand. His eyes are covered with a leathery film, and he finds prey by smell. Nimble gerbils crawl out of their burrows, as well as a striped mouse characteristic of the Namib with four dark stripes on the back. The Kaffir strider is also found here - a rather large (up to four kilograms in weight) animal of a strange appearance, similar to a giant jerboa and capable of making six-meter jumps. Occasionally, along the valleys of dry rivers, flocks of baboons descend to the ocean, and sometimes elephants wander. But rainy weather is a rarity in Namibe. Both plants and desert animals have learned to extract moisture from the night air. Insects manage to drink the dew drops that settle on their bodies from the mist, and plants absorb the condensate that covers the leaves through stomata that are on their surface. The most unusual, one might say, amazing Namib plant is the Welwitschia dwarf tree. Its trunk is half hidden in the sand and rises above it by 20-30 centimeters, a maximum of half a meter, but it reaches one and a half meters in thickness. The main root of velvichia goes 5-7 meters deep, and side roots lie at the very surface, eagerly absorbing moisture from occasional rains and heavy dew. But the leaves of velvichia are especially striking. She has only two of them, but what! Wriggling green ribbons, one meter wide, stretch in both directions from the trunk, reaching a length of six meters. Their green tongues creeping along the ground resemble tentacles, which is why the Welwitschia is often called the "octopus of the desert." Only thanks to such a peculiar arrangement of the crown, this plant can fully use the coastal fog - the main source of moisture in the Namibe. Velvichia wood does not have annual rings. It burns well with almost no smoke. Velvichia lives for an extremely long time - up to two thousand years. Another plant that is found almost exclusively in these parts is the wild nara melon, which bears fruit only once every ten years. Juicy oval fruits of nara more than once saved travelers who died of thirst. Life in the desert is activated only in the short morning hours, when the night cold recedes, but the surface of the sand dunes has not yet become hot from the sun. Indeed, at the height of the day, the sand heats up to seventy degrees, and the only salvation for beetles, lizards and other small living creatures is a relatively cool hole. Only on the ocean coast is life in full swing all day long. On the beaches at the foot of rocky capes, eared seals arrange their rookeries. These hefty, two hundred kilogram animals feed on fish, which abound in the waters of the Benguela Current. I must say that these are the only seals that live in the tropics. Off the coast of the cold desert there are fifteen rookeries of eared seals, where a total of up to a million animals live. The abundance of marine mammals allows flocks of brown hyenas to survive in the coastal sands of Namiba. In the absence of their main food - carrion - in the depths of the desert, they have completely switched to a marine diet and eat the bodies of dead seals thrown out by the waves. On the rocky islands, the many-voiced din of bird colonies does not stop. Millions of pelicans, flamingos, cormorants and seagulls nest here. Small spectacled penguins are busily pacing next to them. A person was brought to these uninhabitable lands for two reasons: greed and misfortune. In the depths of the coastal dunes and on the beaches, large diamonds of excellent quality are often found, and many adventurers have paid with their lives in pursuit of their deceptive brilliance. And the victims of shipwrecks have long cursed the fogs and sandy shoals of the treacherous Namibian coast, which has become the grave for hundreds of ships and many thousands of sailors. Underwater beds of sand, like dunes on land, move day after day, subject to the whims of storm waves, so that no sea chart of the area can be considered one hundred percent reliable. It happened that a ship anchored in the bay, having completed repairs or waited out a storm, turned out to be cut off from the sea by a suddenly grown sandy barrier. The sailors who abandoned the useless ship went along the shore in search of water, but few managed to escape. Captivated by the moving sands, the ship turned out to be a few years later a hundred meters from the ocean, surrounded on all sides by the beach. Who knows what treasures are kept by the remains of sailboats buried in the dunes of the Namib... Their secret will not be told to anyone by the whitened skeletons that diamond seekers sometimes stumble upon here. At one time, the French archaeologist Abbé Bray discovered in one of the local bays a stone slab with the words engraved on it: "Golden Doe" - Drake's people. "But no other traces of the famous pirate and treasure hunter have been found in Namibe. In the area, according to legend, chests with gold and diamonds were buried by the formidable Captain Kidd, who terrified the Spaniards. And the first European who visited the Skeleton Coast 500 years ago was the Portuguese captain Diogo Can. In 1485, he landed at Cape Cross, seven hundred kilometers south of the Cunene River, and erected a stone obelisk here - padran, on which he immortalized his achievement: after all, he managed to go south further than all the Portuguese captains - pupils of the famous Prince Henry the Navigator. Padran Kana has survived to this day as a monument to the bravery and courage of a desperate sailor. And the maps drawn by the Portuguese soon helped his countryman Bartolomeu Dias to be the first to circumnavigate Africa and discover the Cape of Good Hope. It was Dias who first moored in Walvis Bay south of Cape Cross, which later became the place where the Namibian "diamond rush" was born. It all started with the fact that one hunter shot an ostrich in the vicinity of the bay, in the stomach of which he found several large diamonds. (Ostriches often swallow pebbles, which help them grind hard grains and plant parts in their stomachs.) But the climate of the Namib desert was not conducive to the development of the diamond industry, and the finds of precious stones were not as frequent as we would like, and the enriched "knights of fortune" could be counted on the fingers. There were far more of those whose white bones forever remained in the sands ... Now a state-owned company is engaged in diamond mining in Namibia, and "policemen on camels patrol the coast, catching poachers. For tourists, Namib offers a whole scattering of unique places, to visit which is the dream of any traveler. You can go to Walvis Bay to admire the giant dunes at the very edge of the ocean and bird colonies on the rocks. And you can visit the seal reserve at Cape Cross or the dunes of Sosusulei in the depths of the desert. Here, a tourist can experience incomparable sensations while flying in a hot air balloon over XNUMX-meter dunes, when wild animals absolutely do not react to balloonists silently flying a dozen meters above them. But it is no less interesting to visit the Naukluft mountains, located in the heart of the Namib. There, among the mountains rising for two kilometers, there are green oases with cool springs - shelters for numerous animals and birds. Moreover, you can admire them not only from the car, since there are no predators dangerous for humans in the local mountains. But zebras, antelopes and baboons will definitely meet the traveler. In addition, to truly feel what the desert is, right, it is worth experiencing once the sensations of a traveler who fell under the canopy of an oasis after a difficult journey along the Namib trails. For many centuries, nature and man have taken great care to increase the sinister glory of the Skeleton Coast. But still, for all its inaccessibility and terrible conditions for life, the Namib, unlike any other area in the world, has a kind of harsh charm. To understand this, it is enough, for example, to climb one evening on Saddle Hill - a high hill resembling a saddle that rises next to Sinsh Bay. Here, near the only source for 300 kilometers in the district, a pillar was dug with an iron shield, on which a skull and crossbones flaunt, with a laconic inscription under them: "Fill your flasks!". And from the top of the hill, the traveler will see a spectacle that will reward him for all the difficulties of the journey. And it will be impossible to take your eyes off the wondrous panorama of the fiery red dune ridges going into the distance, the foamy surf strip in which the black backs of seals flash, and flocks of flamingos flying over the sea like a pink cloud. And the traveler will stay on the hill, unable to leave, until late in the evening, until the last ray of the sun hides in the waters of the Atlantic, covered with a white veil of fog ... Author: B.Wagner
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