Spitzkoppe

Clear topaz, glass fakes and the wall visitors kept wetting

In 1889 a German mineralogist called Hintze published a description of some topaz crystals a Baron von Steinäcker had picked up at a place then written as Keins-Berge. They reminded him of Russian topaz, and he called them “water clear”. That hill is Klein Spitzkoppe, the smaller peak a dozen kilometres or so west of the big one, and people have been digging it by hand ever since.

Silver topaz and the glass from Usakos

The stones come out of narrow pegmatite veins, seldom more than a metre wide, and out of the gravel below them. Between 1930 and 1938 some 34.5 kg of cutting-grade topaz was recorded from Namibia, most of it from here, and a crystal reported in 1940 measured 15 cm long and weighed over 2 kg. The trade name is “silver” topaz because nearly all of it is colourless. The geologist Bruce Cairncross and his co-authors give a likely reason: yellow tints in topaz fade in sunlight, and most of these crystals have lain on or near the surface. No gems have come from Gross Spitzkoppe itself, although it is the same granite.

Most of the digging is done by Damara families, informally and by hand. After years of roadside stalls they got an indoor market at the B2 turn-off in 2010, called Ûiba-Ôas, which means “searching for life”. One miner there, George van Staden, told an interviewer he was “born in stones”. That same year, in March, The Namibian reported that tourists at the turn-off had been sold coloured glass as beryl, tourmaline and topaz, and that its reporters found identical pieces in a shop in Usakos. A Swakopmund jeweller who looked at them said the colour and the cut were both too perfect, and that they felt cold in the hand. Crystals picked out of the gravel are usually scuffed, so a flawless one deserves a second look.

What is on the wall at Bushman’s Paradise

Vandals are often said to have ruined most of the paintings. The detail is in a survey by two University of Namibia researchers, Goodman Gwasira and Georgine Katjiuongua, who went along the shelter five metres at a time. It is 45 m long, with paint on 40 m of it, and the archaeologist John Kinahan had recorded more than 200 paintings there in 1990.

Near the left end thirteen people walk in single file, most with bows and quivers, and an elephant is painted above them. Further along are two rhinos in white, a big one ahead of a small one, and giraffes done in red and white. One has only a head and a back line, which Kinahan read as a snake with a giraffe’s head. Both animals belong to San ideas about rain, and some figures sit where water runs down the rock, which the researchers think was deliberate.

The harm is concentrated in the three middle sections, where guides stop. The surveyors found nine spots where visitors had splashed liquid on the paint to make it show up in photographs, plus charcoal scribbles, chipping, and one piece of painted rock cut clean out, with the marks of a second attempt. During their fieldwork the camp caught a visitor who had gone up without a guide and wet the wall, and had to let the culprit go. The sections nobody is shown have escaped the vandals. Some have faded on their own, but the three antelope at the far right are in good condition. An overlander who did the chain walk in 2021 found the art hard to make out, so ask your guide to walk the full length, and leave the water bottle in your bag.

Kinahan identified several animals as cattle, evidence that people here were herding as well as hunting. The guides tell visitors they are buffalo.

Granite from when the Atlantic opened

The rock is between 124 and 137 million years old. It rose as molten granite when Africa and South America were pulling apart, and cooled underground. Everything since has been the softer country around it wearing away. Dating on three similar hills further south in the Namib put their own wear at roughly five metres in a million years, so the outline you see has barely changed for longer than there have been people.

Gross Spitzkoppe and the Pontok Mountains are two separate masses with a flat pass about 100 m wide between them. The Pontoks take their name from the rounded huts the Damara built, which is what the domes look like from the plain. Some of the loose boulders are 10 m across.

Small animals, and one pair of cheetahs

Campers should expect little game. A couple who write as Wilkinson’s World found every regular campsite taken on a July weekend in 2008 and noted that the animals made themselves scarce. A photographer writing for Tracks4Africa makes the same point: nothing here is used to people. He counts his one leopard among the rocks as a once in a lifetime sighting.

What does show is smaller. The rock art surveyors met klipspringer and dassies in the bushy hollow in front of the painted shelter. The Wilkinsons saw a pair of black mongooses at a disused reservoir, and Herero chats at Small Bushman’s Paradise at lunchtime. The black mongoose was only described in 1928. It spends most of its time among granite boulders, from the Erongo north into Angola, and takes the odd dassie, though more often birds and rodents. In a later post the same couple wrote of two cheetahs standing on a small hill close to Spitzkoppe, which moved off as soon as a camera came out. That is one account, and I have found no other.

Lovebirds nest in the rocks above the campsites, and after a summer shower frogs start up in the pools. People who write about the nights keep coming back to the sky. The Wilkinsons, there under a full moon, never needed their torches. On the 4x4 Community forum one regular says the arch looks small from below, so climb up to it, and two of them say two nights is the right stay.