A pan to the north, once strewn with microliths, shards, hand axes and grinders, indicated that there humans and their food sources had long converged. Witsand was a regular workshop and slaughterhouse, a successful survival ground in the semi-desert. After an earlier wrangle over rights, lasting 15 years, its grasses all but extinct, in 1993 Witsand became the charge of Jeanene and Reinhardt Jessnitz, its conservators. As they say, they just had to hunker down on it, allow it to restore itself. Still it supplies water to the farmers in the lee of the Langberg.
Local rangers are in training for diplomatic outreach.
A conservancy belt around it is planned. They are outstandingly beautiful, isolated like that, blooming. But the point is they rest upon an aquifer of quartzite basins, containing a bulk of rainwater as large as the Hartbeespoort Dam. Nor are they orangey waves stained with iron oxide, Kalahari-style. Like time itself, they have been leached paler and paler to white-out.