For the most part, The Sheltering Desert is a survival adventure about two men who take refuge in the Namib desert during World War II. But on a deeper and perhaps more fundamental level, it’s a story of transformation. Of what happens when your life is dictated by the demands and rhythms of a harsh wilderness. It’s the story of decivilization, or perhaps recivilization. Learning to live life by different rules.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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<\/p>The Sheltering Desert is a misleading title; technically, it’s just the name of the English translation. Originally, the memoir was titled If War Comes, We’ll Spend It in the Desert, written by a German geologist named Henno Martin. He and his colleague Hermann Korn lived and worked in South-West Africa when World War II began. As German nationals in a UK territory, they would have been designated as “enemy aliens” and incarcerated in internment camps. Most likely, shipped off to the Isle of Man. Instead, they decided to flee into the desert to wait out the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although they were both as familiar with the region as any scientist doing field work, neither man had any survival training. They had a lot to learn during their stay, and this is perhaps what’s most fascinating about the memoir. They learned things like how following a set of animal tracks could lead nowhere, but if you followed overlapping tracks of multiple species, it would invariably lead to a watering hole. Martin writes about their early days figuring out the fundamentals of how to set up camp, how to hunt wildlife, how to store water, how to catch fish, how to smoke different meats, and even how to avoid getting on each other’s nerves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like the environment, the writing can be dry. Martin was a geologist, not a poet (although he does manage to wax rhapsodic about geological features). But there are moments that come alive regardless of the quality of the writing: the enormity of the Namib’s vast expanse seen from a mountaintop, or watching the massive gray curtain of an approaching thunderstorm, or startling a herd of thousands of springbok into rippling action, or the absurdity of dancing ostriches. Some moments are powerful enough that they need no poetry. A scientist’s dispassionate eye and Martin’s Teutonic prose can’t help but express the majesty and the magic. The desert provides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They had a camera, and the 1958 edition I read includes reproductions of several of their photographs. These are mostly unspectacular colorless landscapes or “squint and you can see them” images of distant wildlife (Martin notes that the sound of a shutter would scare away game). To get a sense for the desert where they lived, don’t think of the sandscapes in Dune. Instead, think of the rich color and texture of Fury Road, which was shot in the same desert where Martin and Korn took refuge. It’s worth noting that George Miller made liberal use of CG in Fury Road’s post-processing, mostly to make it more orange. But you get the picture. The Namib is not the Sahara.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the two men pass the time, they have in-depth conversations about science, biology, evolution, and human nature. As Martin recounts these conversations in his typically dry style, it’s a bit like listening to a professor giving a very German lecture. These are men still grappling with the impact of Darwin and Spencer, processing evolution and survival of the fittest, pondering the duality of cruelty and compassion. To be honest, some of it is above my paygrade, and during most of these discursion, I just wanted them to get back to stalking antelope, fretting about the dwindling water, being nonplussed at how to track bees to get to the honey, or getting revenge on the ornery babboobs who fouled their water supplies (one of my favorite episodes involves a baboon who steals their binoculars).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During one of these conversations, Martin mentions, almost in passing, that they’ve had to cultivate a tolerance for cruelty:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nSteadily our world grew more parched and desolate. Sometimes we asked ourselves whether cruelty were an essential ingredient of life. Wherever you looked, life seemed the enemy of life. In our own case the growing dryness intensified the struggle for survival and made it more ruthless; and we ourselves had to be more ruthless if we did not want to perish.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
An example is their evolving attitude toward hunting, which doesn’t come naturally to them. When the war broke out, the British confiscated rifles. So when they set out into the Namib, they were only armed with a pistol and a shotgun. The shotgun, it turns out, worked wonders against quail gathered at a watering hole, and they routinely scored several birds with a single shell. But neither of their weapons is ideal for hunting larger game like springboks (basically, deer), gemsboks (bigger deer!), and zebras (striped deer!). These would technically be antelopes, oryxes, and zebras, but Sheltering Desert is faithful to the lexicon they used in Africa in the 1940s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As they hunt to varying degrees of success or failure, they adapt. They learn to modify their ammunition, to take into account each gun’s idiosyncrasies, and to study their prey’s anatomy to determine where best to shoot for a kill. But it’s the attitude towards the coup de grace<\/em> that provides bookends for how they went into the desert and how they came out. At first, they’re insistent about putting wounded animals out of their misery, even when it’s a hated hyena that’s been harrying their camp. They end up spending a lot of ammunition and effort, and often inadvertently causing more suffering when they try to administer a coup de grace<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Contrast this with a later hunting episode, near the end of the book. Animals were especially lean due to drought conditions, and the men have run out of the stores of animal fat they use to supplement their meals. They’re starting to suffer from lack of fat intake. But they’ve figured out that even in lean times, pregnant animals store more fat for lactating. Martin manages to find an obviously pregnant gembok cow, but he misses his shot and punctures her lung instead of hitting her heart. Rather than chase her down to put her out of her misery, and thereby risk alarming her into flight and possible escape, Martin dispassionately watches the struggling cow take hours to bleed out and die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s cruel, but by this point in the story, Martin describes the incident not as an example of his hardened compassion. He instead wonders if the dying cow has specifically positioned herself to face upwind, as if she knew her nose would defend her from threats downwind. Has she situated her eyes to defend her from threats she might not smell? By this point in the story of their survival, it’s just a matter-of-fact account of an observant scientist scoring some much-needed fat, and he doesn’t comment on the learned cruelty of someone having to survive in the desert. Martin isn’t that kind of introspective. He has assimilated the harshness of the Namib to the point that he doesn’t even observe it as cruelty. This is no longer the man who came here in 1941.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I did have a few questions about Martin’s account. Although Martin wrote this account, some of the more dramatic moments happened to Korn alone. He was the one who ventured into town for a risky attempt to replenish their supplies, where he would have been arrested if he’d been discovered. He’s the one who had a harrowing face-to-face encounter with Old Scarfoot, the leopard they’d known only from its footprints, where they could make out its scar. It was Korn who suffered the long and debilitating illness that eventually ended their stay in the desert. But it was also Korn who died in an automobile accident right after the war. Martin didn’t write and publish this memoir until 1957. I wonder what kind of writer Korn would have been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They bring a dog named Otto with them. At first, I had assumed Otto was there for utilitarian purposes. In the survival game Robinson Crusoe — don’t laugh, since Martin invokes Defoe’s story more than once! — the dog is the equivalent of half of a human for purposes of doing work, and it doesn’t even eat any of your food. But in Martin and Korn’s situation, it seems the dog is useless as anything other than a pet. In fact, Otto is mostly a liability for how he scares away game, for how he attracts hungry jackals to their camp, for how he has to be fed even when their supplies are low, and on a couple of occasions, for how he gets injured and has to be tended. Although Otto seems like a very good boy, he didn’t make their lives any easier. Would a long enough stay in the desert have disabused them of the human tendency to keep pets? Okay, yes, I’m wondering at what point they would have eaten Otto. I admit I’m not a dog person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although I did notice when they’re celebrating, they have a precious store of chocolate. Martin mentions specifically that they share the chocolate with Otto! Isn’t chocolate bad for dogs? I guess they didn’t know this in 1941. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In terms of another distinctly human foible, Korn was a smoker. His evening pipe was a fixture of their conversations. One of the crises that causes them to risk a trip into town to reprovision is Korn running out of tobacco! It’s hard to see smoking as anything other than a weakness, especially in a situation like this. If you want to take refuge in the desert, you should probably quit smoking first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This leads me to another minor issue I have with the account. Martin and Korn could have returned to civilization at any time. They had driven a truck into the desert, and they kept it hidden, but in good repair. They used it occasionally to scout, or move camp, or transport game. They were never really in any danger of dying, and the hardship they suffered was voluntary. All told, the stakes were relatively low in that they were fleeing incarceration by a relatively civilized authority, and not concentration camps, or being sent to the Eastern front, or anything life-threatening. In fact, when Korn got sick and they had to return, the eventual consequences were just fines for minor infractions. For the remainder of the war, both men worked for the British to build wells in the desert. This survival story is more an act of civil disobedience than survival. Henry David Thoreau instead of Anne Frank. Walden Watering Hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n