18S9.] Formation on the South West Coast of Africa, S^c. 329 



cross it, and form smaller hills as far as the Swakop river. This 

 latter however runs into the sea every year, and scours its bed clean of 

 the sands blown into it during the preceding dry season. Con- 

 sequently we find no sand dunes north of this river ; and also as we 

 travel northwards and parallel to the coast we find the desert strip 

 steadily narroM^s until in the Kaoko veldt, about 150 miles north of 

 the Swakop, we reach a district with a steady annual rainfall and 

 grass right down to the sea beach. The struggle which has taken 

 place between the sand and the Kinsib river is beautifully exemplified 

 between Sandwich Harbour and Walfish Bay. There is no doubt 

 that this river formerly debouched at the former port and has gradually 

 been pushed north for thirty miles, until it empties itself at Walfish 

 Bay. This is clearly proved by the old silt bed, with root and stems 

 of reeds still undecomposed, appearing everywhere under and between 

 the sand hills, while fresh w^ater is obtainable at a depth of a foot or 

 two, anywhere above high water mark, between Sandwich Harbour 

 and Walfish Bay and nowhere else along the coast ; and the spaces 

 between the sand dunes are covered with water grasses and reeds 

 growing in the silt and nourished by the same fresh water. And in 

 the spaces between the sand hills near Walfish Bay are still to be seen 

 the deeply impressed foot-prints of elephants and rhinoceroses, in the 

 sunbaked silt, thus shewing that prior to the advance of the sand, 

 ,<considerable vegetation, on which those animals subsisted, must have 

 covered the present waste. 



I think I have conclusively shewn the great effect which these sand 

 hills have had upon the meteorological conditions of the South-west 

 Coast, and it only remains to point out the lesson to be derived, viz., 

 , the great importance of arresting the formation of .similar deposits in 

 their early stage by planting them with grasses and shrubs calculated 

 Jo bind the sand and thus preventing them from extending until they 

 ..become past control. 



H. c. w^ 



