Once, as a child aged 13, I noticed a book that had been wrongly placed on my shelves. At first I took it to be The Lost World, the story of Professor Challenger's bumbling expedition to a kingdom of monsters within the steaming forests of South America.
Conan Doyle's book was a ripping tale but had the disadvantage of being make-believe, whereas the great thing about The Lost World of the Kalahari, this other book, was that it was for real.
Somewhere out there, the last Bushmen actually existed. There was one of them on the cover, an off-yellow lady who wore only a scanty apron of thin leather and a necklace fashioned from ostrich eggshell.
She had a stick in her hand - it could be usefully employed to dig up grubs, I imagined - and she was looking over her left shoulder, as if she had mislaid something precious in the ochre sand.
I already had ambitions to be an explorer, and as I grew older this book helped sustain my dream. Laurens van der Post's Kalahari was a place where strange, inexplicable things could still happen. It was a never-never land. "Ever since the days of the first Bushman," I read, "no hunter had ever killed an Eland without thanking it with a dance."
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