In search of ironstone art, salt and wolves in Hard Rock Country

There are, mainly, two kinds of people who head to Brandvlei.

The first are on their way to or from the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. The second are birders, wanting to tick off the elusive Red Lark or Black-Eared Finchlark. We fell into a tiny third category, those interested in ironstone art, salt and wolves. 

The road between Calvinia and Brandvlei reveals a world stripped down to its Bushmanland basics of rocks, grass and sky. (Image: Chris Marais)

Brandvlei is a town where nothingness grows knee-high, as a passing traveller once noted.

The houses are shuttered against the elements with shade netting and awnings. The large yards are swept, not mown. Camelthorns and the invasive mesquite trees provide shade against summer’s furnace heat.

There is one restaurant, a small supermarket, an agricultural co-op, a clinic, a home industries shop and a hotel that has seen better days.

Read more: One night in Brandvlei – Karoo koeksisters at the front door to the Big Nothing

We headed past the popular Windpomp Restaurant (owned by an Elvis impersonator) to our favourite guesthouse, the Casablanca Overnight Accommodation on the edge of town. Here our host, Rui Narciso, was also running a miniature farming operation with sheep, goats and chickens. But all our attention was on the eight lively wolfdogs, inherited from his late, dearly missed partner, Jaci Farrell. He warned us not to pat them, no matter how tempted we were. 

Rui Narciso, with his pipe, in Casablanca’s outdoor entertainment area. (Image: Chris Marais)

The fierce wolf-dogs of Casablanca. Unless you are Rui, do not pet. (Photo: Chris Marais)

We contented ourselves with trying to learn their names (Bea, Bella, Zurza, Salem, Timber, Mischka, Azul and Shunka). Each wolf, we observed, had its favourite shade spot and sunning place. The pack is obedient only to Rui. At night, his bed is an island in a sea of fur and fang, the safest place in the whole of Bushmanland.

But the wolfish dogs were just a bonus. We were on the hunt for art etched on very hard rock.

The rise of Ironstone

The dark boulders and flat-topped hills around Brandvlei and the rest of the Karoo are the remains of molten magma that rose from deep in the Earth’s mantle 182.5 million years ago, just when the continents of Gondwana started to split up.

It is far harder than any other formation in the Karoo. Once exposed, it shields the surrounding sandstone and shale from erosion, which is why the Karoo has so many flat-topped hills.

Where the magma intruded at temperatures of 1,200°C, the surrounding sandstone and siltstone heated and cracked. These faults later became handy underground water reservoirs. Practically every borehole and windmill in the Karoo is close to a level dolerite sill. From the air, they are marked by greener lines of vegetation.

Dolerite boulders indicate underground faults that store water. That’s where farmers drill for water. (Image: Chris Marais)

Most of the shade here is thanks to a fearsome invader, the honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa). (Image: Chris Marais)

The heat also hardened fine-grained shale into hornfels. Also known as lidianite, hornfels can be flaked into a leaf shape with sharp edges. With it, the San would later create tools for cutting, scraping and stabbing. 

Professor emeritus of geology at Rhodes University, Julian “Goonie” Marsh, is a Karoo dolerite specialist. 

“I have found some places along dolerite dykes intruding shales, where the ground is littered with hundreds of worked hornfels fragments. One can imagine such sites to literally have been stone tool ‘factories’. Without dolerite to make hornfels, one wonders whether this Stone Age culture could have thrived as it did across the Karoo Basin.”

Fresh Chance and a dark canvas

Above ground, the exposed boulders slowly weathered over aeons from pale grey and yellowish to darker brown, or in the case of this area, a gleaming, polished black. This dark, shiny patina, also called desert varnish, proved irresistible to the San artists of this region. Anyone scraping, cutting or engraving the rock with a hard object reveals the lighter colour beneath – a perfect canvas for artistic expression.

This is what we were here for. Did Rui know any farmers who knew of rock engravings on their farm? 

“I think Danie van Wyk does,” he said, reaching for his cell phone. The next day, we headed out to meet him on Varskans (Fresh Chance) farm.

It’s a puzzling name in this punishingly arid land. The neighbouring farm, even more oddly, is called Kans (Chance).

Dr Janette Deacon offers an explanation in her book My Heart Stands in the Hill. Kans is “a corruption of the /Xam word !kann, meaning a place of standing water. When the water evaporates, the clay and natural salts create a flat area,” she writes.

The farms “are both adjacent to a large pan called Kans se Vloer about 30km west of Brandvlei. Flamingos gather there in summer, but the water and surrounding soil is too brackish and is not suitable for irrigation.” 

Uncle Must Rock

Danie van Wyk said he would meet us at the farmhouse, then lead us onto the farm road close to the paintings so we could explore on our own.

“It’s a kind of little canyon, almost hidden from view, where water cut a channel that empties into a pan called Kans se Vloer,” he explained. His wife Nonnie added that in times of rain, it is the most amazing place, complete with pretty ferns. 

This is where “nothingness grows knee-high”. (Image: Chris Marais)

Danie set off ahead of us on his scrambler, heading for the far end of his farm. We followed him through a maze of gates and tracks. This is Bushmanland, where Karoo and Kalahari meet. Our tyres were geared for Karoo clay, which demands fairly hard pressure to cut through the clay and to bounce over stones. But then we met up with a little drift of soft Kalahari sand. We slowed and suddenly our wheels were spinning. 

Mercifully, our guide reappeared. 

“Oom Chris moet wieg,” he suggested politely. We misheard that as ‘bieg’, which means to surrender or confess. 

I beg yours? 

After this moment of confusion, Danie smiled kindly at us, then knelt down to let the tyres down by at least half a bar. We all scrabbled the sand loose from the tyres, then Danie let them down a little more. The wheels spun again and the bakkie dug itself still deeper. 

“Oom Chris moet bietjie wieg,” Danie said again. This time we understood the words, at least: “Uncle Chris must rock.” 

Even so, something was being lost in translation. Chris mutely handed over the keys to Danie, who climbed into the driver’s seat, gently reversed a few centimetres and then let the bakkie rock forward, easing back and forth, less than half a metre at a time, compacting the sand under the tyres. 

And within minutes we were out. 

Farmer Danie van Wyk took us to see this mysterious part of Bushmanland outside Brandvlei – a land of wolves, hard rocks and salt. (Photo: Chris Marais)

The Canyon of Varskans

Danie parked his scrambler beside our bakkie and walked with us through this rough, stony landscape to a mini canyon, fewer than two storeys. The pillared rocks rose on either side like walls, and the sandy floor was about 20m wide.

We startled a pale barn owl which flew soundlessly away, the very spirit of beauty. 

And suddenly, on rocks atop the canyon, were the engravings. An ostrich here, a gemsbok there, an eland, something that looked like a cow, perhaps a zebra and a lion. Or was it a baboon?

The dark boulders were irresistible canvases for ancient artists. (Image: Chris Marais)

Successful hunts and rain were unpredictable for the ancient inhabitants of this land, “but across the Karoo engravings were everywhere, reminding, reassuring and repairing,” wrote Professor John Parkington in his book San Rock Engravings: Marking the Karoo Landscape. (Image: Chris Marais)

There was a rock gong that rang over the landscape with a metallic “tong” when struck.

In Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd’s book there is an intriguing note about a place called !kann, where Dia!kwain’s father Xaa-tin “chipped gemsbok, quagga and ostriches, at a place where they used to drink, before the time of the boers”.

Janette Deacon speculates that “if the engravings were indeed done by Dia!kwain’s father, Xaa-tin, this is the only instance in South Africa where we have the name and positive identification of a San rock engraving artist”.

Salt and Ironstone

There was a spring close by. Water would pour through the canyon during the wet season, said Danie. 

“Look how close the water is to the surface,” he said, bending to dig a few handfuls. A hand’s depth down, and the sand was wet.

Water sometimes roars down this miniature canyon, lined by dolerite formations weathered into shapes resembling pillars, slabs and wool bales. (Image: Chris Marais)

Many Brandvlei farmers managed to survive the drought thanks to salt.

He told us about how farmers long ago used to build shallow dams (saaidamme) to grow wheat and other crops. 

But they don’t do it any more. It turns out that the Karoo rock formations here, so rich in minerals, make the water salty or brackish. Very bad for most plants. But this, in turn, has given rise to Brandvlei’s biggest sustainable industry: salt.

Out on the alluringly named Granaatboskolk road, we had seen snowy piles of the white stuff in a yard. We ended up chatting to William Singleton who works for the Donald Brown Group of Companies, the owners of Saltcor. They employ 30 to 40 people in Brandvlei alone. Salt helped many farmers through the drought in this area.

William took us out to one of the salt pans, where a solitary pump throbbed away, the water piped into a shallow pond. Here it would evaporate slowly over several months until the salt precipitated, forming crystals that are then scraped off. 

Thanks to the dolerite, this salt also contains trace elements of calcium, magnesium and sulphates. 

So the next time you pass a Karoo ironstone koppie, doff your hat. You are looking at the source of our salt and fertile soil, our secret water stashes, our ancient art canvases, our singing rocks and our ancient stone tools. DM

This is an excerpt from Karoo Roads IV – In Faraway Places, by Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit. For an insider’s view on life in the South African Heartland, get the Karoo Quartet set of books (Karoo Roads I-IV) for only R960, including taxes and courier costs in South Africa. For more details, contact Julie at [email protected]