The Drakensberg is the highest range in southern Africa, and its centrepiece is a single basalt wall: the Amphitheatre, five kilometres long, on the border between South Africa and Lesotho. The Tugela leaves the top of it and falls 948 metres in five leaps. From the meadow trail in the Royal Natal valley the ground pulls back far enough to hold all five kilometres in one view, with antelope grazing in front of it to give you the scale. Before the sun clears the horizon the basalt shifts from grey to burning copper while the foothills stay dark. On a still morning a flooded pan on the valley floor doubles the whole ridge. The falls keep their own calendar: full weight after the summer rains, down to a silver thread by dry winter.
Both faces of the wall are walked. The path up the Tugela Gorge is easy until it stops being a path: the last of it is boulder-hopping up the riverbed and a cable bridge that sways as you cross into the spray. In the foothills, protected shelters at Game Pass, Kamberg and Giant's Castle carry the largest body of rock art in Africa: ochre-and-white eland, hunters and dancers layered on sandstone over thousands of years. The eland appears more than any other animal, and not as a trophy: it carried the greatest power in San belief. Much of the art records trance and vision rather than the day's work — figures bleeding from the nose, dancers taking antelope form. Overhead the bearded vulture works the escarpment, a raptor that lives almost entirely on bone and drops it from a height to break it open. The other way up starts at the Sentinel, on the far side of the escarpment, where you haul yourself up two sets of steel chain ladders bolted to a nearly vertical face. Above them the tilted summit grassland runs out to the lip, where the Tugela goes off the edge beside your boots with a kilometre of air under it.