The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

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IN THE HOT FLAT BUSH in far northeast Namibia I crossed a bulging termite mound of smooth, ant-chewed sand, and with just the slightest elevation of this swelling under my foot soles the landscape opened in a majestic fan, like the fluttered pages of a whole unread book.

I then resumed kicking behind a file of small-bodied, mostly naked men and women who were quick-stepping under a sky fretted with golden fire through the dry scrub of what was once coarsely known in Afrikaans as Boesmanland (Bushman Land) — pouch-breasted women laughing among themselves, an infant with a head like a fuzzy fruit bobbing in one woman’s sling, men in leather clouts clutching spears and bows, nine of us altogether — and I was thinking, as I’d thought for years traveling the earth among humankind: The best of them are bare-assed.

Happy again, back in Africa, the kingdom of light, I was stamping out a new path, on foot in this ancient landscape, delighting in “a palpable imaginable visitable past — in the nearer distances and clearer mysteries.” I was ducking among thornbushes with slender, golden-skinned people who were the earth’s oldest folk, boasting a traceable lineage to the dark backward and abysm of time in the Upper Pleistocene, thirty-five thousand years or so ago, the proven ancestors of us all, the true aristocrats of the planet.

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