The Sands of Kalahari by William Mulvihill (1960)

The Sands of Kalahari
by William Mulvihill
Publisher:  G. P. Putnam Sons
Copyright:  1960
Book Club Edition

Fly over South West Africa and you will see desert; a third of a million square miles of sand.  From the Angolan border south to the Orange River no water runs into the sea; the beach stretches a hundred miles inland and there is almost no rain:  the Namib Desert.

In the interior great escarpments rise and there are nameless black mountains and great empty savannahs, desolate and dry.  Then another desert, the Kalahari, the Great Thirstland, larger than Texas.  Southward is five hundred miles of parched bushveldt.

In all this vastness there are towns, ranches, mines and settlements but they are jar apart, like atolls dotting a vast ocean.

To the desert came the plane, to the immeasurable wastes of Africa.  And by the dawn of the second day -- after the night storm, the hours of flight, the crash, the day of waiting, and the death of Detjens -- six remained, alone, strangers, with only themselves and the wreckage and the black mountain on the horizon for company.  The six:  sturdevant, the pilot, burdened with a guilt far greater than the loss of his plane; Grimmelmann, the wizened old German, veteran of the Herero war and the two World Wars, wise in the lore of the desert and the ways of the world; Jefferson Smith, a Negro, a professor and a scholar, came to Africa on a Foundation grant; Mike Bain, engineer, drifter, drunkard, vaguely in search of a job in the interior, ill-equipped to cope with the demands of the desert; Grace Monckton, English divorcee, returning to her family's ranch in the Union; and finally, O'Brien, a man of great strength, sometime millionaire, sometime wanderer, a hunter by instinct and by choice.  The six, brought together by chance, and with the odds of survival overwhelmingly against them, have only each other, for both friend and foe.  Around them is the desert -- implacable, pitiless, filled with unseen enemies.  And on the horizon is the black mountain, beyond which is hidden the unknown.

Condition:  Used.  Hardcover.  Dust cover is discolored and shows wear, creasing and tears.  Dust cover spine is torn and creased.  Pages are tanning from age.  Previous owner's name is blacked out on the front endpaper with the date written underneath.  There's an envelope pasted to the front endpaper as a way of keeping track of her books.

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