'Scenery that looks very dreary in the glare of a mid-day sun always looks enchanting, mysterious and even beautiful in the light cast from the last rays of the sun over the desert. Ordeal is replaced by enchantment, aggression replaced by serenity and peace. I find wilderness to be a very schizophrenic beast and experiencing the onset of evening in the real bush is one of life’s great pleasures. The temperature drops, the insects go away, there is the prospect of a meal. Then to bed on the roof of our vehicle in an environment that is guaranteed to be silent in a way that some people find completely unnerving. The silence of the Namibian desert is so total that I have a name for it. - dark sound (the opposite of white noise). One of the enduring puzzles of these desert places is, ‘where does everything go?’ We tried very hard, travelling to really remote locations in Damaraland, Namibia, just inland from the dunes of the Namib desert. We could see tens of kilometres into the distance, yet where were the rhinos? One year we went through a real rhino drought, not seeing any for several months. Then in the riverbed of the Barab River our luck changed, and it did so in the evening as we stopped to make camp. As if by magic a pair of kudu appeared against the skyline on a distant ridge and even though they were half a kilometre distant such was the clarity of the air we could clearly hear the sound of their hooves on the rocky outcrops. Later we bedded down on the roof of our vehicle only to be woken up some time later by the sound of clinking pebbles as some unseen animal negotiated the rocky terrain somewhere on a nearby ridge. For what seemed like ages we listened to the sounds getting louder and louder. The sounds finally stopping a few yards from our vehicle. My torch revealed our visitor to be a black rhino!'

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