Alan Dean Foster - Impossible Places by Impossible Places (v1.0 htm SSC)

Author:Impossible Places (v1.0 htm SSC) [Places, Impossible]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Matthew Ovatango looked all the next day and well on into the evening before getting on the radio and calling for help. Planes flew out from Sesfontein and scanned from the air, but it was a couple of days before two Land Rovers full of rangers could arrive from Otjiwarongo and begin to search on foot.

They found a well-equipped Toyota Land Cruiser registered to an Anna Witbooi of Windhoek. Its tank was a quarter full, and there were three jerry cans of petrol in the back end. Protected from the omnipresent dust and grit by a plastic laundry bag, a severe black business suit with fluted white blouse hung like a shed exoskeleton from a hook above the passenger seat. From the empty vehicle they tracked petite footprints to the base of the inselberg, and from there climbed up and discovered the great arch. But there was nothing to indicate that Anna Witbooi or Howard Cooperman had ever climbed that far.

Eventually the search was called off, as were many in that part of Kaokoland and the Skeleton Coast, and the friends and relatives of the respective missing parties were officially notified. But the place was not forgotten, for awed anthropologists came to study the magnificent etchings that decorated the underside of the impossible granite bridge. They took measurements and made drawings and carefully photographed the deft incisions that extended from one end of the arch to the other, wishing only that more than a few lingering flecks of paint had adhered to the stone.

Sprinkled among the hundreds of animal etchings were the fragile, yet easily recognizable silhouettes of people, the ancient hunter-gatherers who had always followed the now vanished herds and whose most accomplished artists had decorated a thousand similar localities throughout southern Africa, though perhaps none so expertly as this. The images carried baskets and babies, spears and throwing sticks.

The youngest member of the largest party of visiting specialists pointed out that the berry-gathering basket being held by one male figure looked suspiciously like a Nikon. She and her colleagues had a good chuckle over it around the campfire that night, and their laughter lingered in the pure and empty air like a fragment of song.

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