Deadvlei is exactly what its name says: a dead marsh, a floor of white clay in the Namib Desert of Namibia with about a hundred black trees still standing on it. They are camel thorns, and they grew here when the Tsauchab River still flooded this hollow. Then the dunes closed the way in, the water stopped arriving, and the grove died on its feet somewhere between six and nine centuries ago. Nothing has happened to them since. The air is far too dry for wood to rot, so instead of falling they scorched black in the sun and stayed upright. They are often described as petrified, which they are not: this is still wood, centuries dead. Everything on the pan is the last day of the river, left where it was.
Walking out onto the clay, you cross a mosaic of hard plates that crunch under your boots. It is a smaller floor than the photographs suggest, and between the trunks there is no sound at all. The heat comes up off ground that has not had water on it for centuries. The dune that walls the pan is Big Daddy, about 325 metres above the floor, and people come off its face in a few minutes of sliding sand to land among the trees. Behind them the sand runs apricot, the iron in it slowly rusting, and the oldest dunes burn the deepest red. Almost everyone comes for the first hour. Walking in while the sand is still cold puts you among the trees as the sun edges over the dune, and the black trunks throw long lines across the pale clay. Backlit, they go to pure silhouette; with the sun low behind you, the cracked ground at their feet does the work instead. The light is the only thing here that still does anything, and by the middle of the day it has taken even the shadows away.