They dominate the ancient dune fields in every direction, as far as the eye can see. From a distance, looming blue-black above the trees, they draw you on, a cluster of five hills impertinently thrusting skywards through a sea of sand, the tallest towering nearly 300m above the surrounding Kalahari. From its summit there is nothing to be seen but utter wilderness, ruled only by the parallel crests of tree-covered sand dunes receding to the distance: vestigial remains of a Quaternary desert.

Everything about these hills is extraordinary: their very nature, the incongruence of their presence in such an unrelenting sandscape, the tale they tell of climatic change - of lakes, swamps and inland deltas - but above all for the way, through millennia past, they have drawn man to their sheltering shadows. Stone-Age man, hunters, gatherers, cattle keepers, miners, artists, and traders, whose stock has traversed the footpaths of Africa's hinterland and may have reached the farthest corners of the globe.

Although David Livingstone noted the name Sorila on his map, he never actually visited these hills. The first foreigner to do so was Dr Siegfried Passarge in July 1898. In more recent times Laurens van der Post brought Tsodilo to a wider audience with his account of mysterious happenings in Lost World of the Kalahari. In recounting his experiences he created an admixture of coincidence and chance, of the real and imagined, framing the hills with an aura of myth and magic - that everything about them augments - so that it is tempting today not to distinguish one from the other.

Van der Post also made known to the world their most outstanding attribute, one that is earning Tsodilo the status of a World Heritage Site. At more than 450 separate places there are in excess of 5000 individual rock paintings. The work of former Bushman inhabitants these depictions probably range in age from 200 to 5000 years. The majority are of animals, although some are schematic and others of humans and cattle. Eland, giraffe, gemsbok and rhino are the most common creatures.

The "artistic" quality of these depictions varies and some people have been tempted to dismiss them as crude representations, executed by unskilled hands and meaning nothing. This is not true. Thanks to the pioneering and now widely accepted insights of Professor David Lewis-Williams (see Book Reviews, page 109), a strong connection has been established between Bushman mythology/belief systems and the art we see today. A large portion of that art is shamanistic in nature, illustrating the shadowy links between a spirit world joined by energy and belief through trance to the real world, where it can effect rain, healing and general well-being. It is this deeper layer of meaning that elevates rock art, worldwide (for these interpretations hold true in the caves of Europe as well as in the outback of Australia) from simple visual appeal to an enigmatic message of universal ancestral beliefs we have allinherited.

Alec Campbell, then soon to become the Director of the newly created National Museum, made his first of many visits to the hills in the 1960s. His discoveries and interests opened the door to others and we can thank a professorial band of scientists that includes Jim Denbow, Ed Wilmsen, Larry Robbins, George Brook as well as Alec himself, among others, for the exponential growth in our understanding of these hills.

A seven metre deep excavation by the Male hill took archaeologists back to Middle Stone Age times, more than 100,000 years ago. They uncovered stone tools last touched, perhaps, by the earliest of our sapient forebears. In addition to tool-making, that excavation showed evidence of hunting and fishing, yielding one of the oldest fish-hooks so far discovered in southern Africa.

It was George Brook, a geomorphologist from Atlanta University, who broke open calcrete rocks littering the dusty plain to the west of the hills and proved the existence of a former lake. It was his microscope that showed them filled with fossilised freshwater crustacea and his subsequent work gave us the history of this ephemeral lake. A wind-scoured relic today, it helps unravel the story of climatic change since glacial times 18,000 years ago.

Although Bushmen originally occupied the hills, Bantu-speaking pastoralists had settled there by AD550 and co-existed with the first-comers. In addition to evidence of cattle and goats, there was proof that they worked iron and copper. The absence of these metals in the hills and the presence of seashells suggest trade networks with other communities reaching to the coast and beyond.

A second group of Bantu arrived in about AD850 and what is now suspected as their main activity was not guessed at until a casual comment made by Mike Murphy, then a graduate student from Michigan, in the early 1990s. Mike had grown up among small mine workings and recognised them instantly at Tsodilo. Others, unfamiliar with such things, had been walking over and around old mines without "seeing" them, for more than 20 years!

Now some 30 mines are recognised in the hills and evidence suggests a major specularite mining "industry" from AD800 to 1025. The largest mine has two entrances and some 43 metres of passages from which more than 1000 tonnes of rock have been removed: an extraordinary achievement when one considers that fire and wooden tools were all that the miners used to excavate into solid rock.

The original miners have left but Bantu pastoralists still live at Tsodilo. They have their own village and keep their identity separate from the Bushmen. Gladly, the Hambukushu will show you the rocks where footprints of the first cattle can be seen and where "God" used vulval shapes to first explain sex to young men. They accept no authorship for the paintings but their special relationship with the hills is revealed in secret shrine sites throughout them.

Bushman and Bantu: the lives and beliefs of both are equally and inextricably entwined with the hills that shadow them. Go to the hills and you will be similarly entrapped and enchanted. Make it a visit long enough to sit and absorb the atmosphere, for the magic is there - it is only for you to find it. Gaborone-based Mike Main is a regular contributor to Travel Africa and frequent visitor to Tsodilo Hills.

Tsodilo hills factfile

Getting there:
From a visitor's point of view, there are few places in Botswana which are as remote or as difficult to access. Paved roads have edged closer in recent decades but there still remains a grindingly slow, two-and-a-half hour haul by four-wheel-drive. A bush airstrip accommodates light aircraft after a one hour-plus flight from Maun, but one must arrange to be met there with vehicles. It's a long walk round the Hills and the airstrip is 2km from the nearest paintings.

The most rewarding way to visit is to go independently, camp in some of the beautiful camp sites and spend at least two nights at the Hills. Beyond (usually) reliable water and a small museum display, there are no facilities at the campsite and travellers are advised to be totally independent.

What's in a name?
Like many modern names, Tsodilo is a corruption and, in any case, only one of many. Every community associated with the hills has their own names for them. Tsodilo is Setswana and comes, correctly, from Sorile. It was this name that Livingstone placed on his map as Sorila. The Hambukushu community living at the Hills today know them, in their language, as "The Precipitous Rocks" but to the resident Dzucoasi Bushman the hills are more romantically known as "The Bracelet of Shining Copper" or "The Bracelet of the Sunset". The three major rock outcrops are more practically known today as the "Male", the "Female" and the "Child".

Specularite
Specularite is a micaceous, glittering material applied to the body with fat, for decorative purposes. It is still known and recognised among Bantu-speaking people in southern Africa today - but no longer widely used. Until as recently as 30-40 years ago it was still much traded. Early travellers report its high value and extensive use. William Burchell (Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, reprinted 1967 Vol.2. Struik, Cape Town, p256) says it was prepared by grinding with grease and smearing "generally over the body but chiefly on the head; and the hair is so much loaded and clotted with an accumulationof it that the clots exhibit the appearance of lumps of mineral". Methuen (Life in the Wilderness, London, 1846, p95) described people covering their hair with a paste of black lead-ore till their heads shone, as if they wore metal skullcaps.

Published in Travel Africa Edition Twelve: Summer 2000 Text is subject to Worldwide Copyright (c)