Kalahari Dreaming: The Romance of the Desert

“Kalahari—what a beautiful word. It rolls off the tongue with satisfying ease, seeming to apply distance. A great wilderness of waving grasses, humming with grasshopper song under a hot wind and a sky of vibrant blue.” —Rupert Isaacson, The Healing Land

But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. —Andrew Marvell (1621–78)

Oh that the desert were my dwelling place, With only one fair spirit for my minister. That I might forget the human race, And hating no one, love her only. —Lord Byron

For hundreds of years the vast territory of the Kalahari remained a blank on the map. Yet it gripped the imagination of poets, painters, writers, dreamers, adventurers and not a few charlatans. This book is a whimsical anthology of those who were inspired by this desert, those who lived in its bitter confines and those who died in its dry embrace.