Spitzkoppe is a bare granite pyramid that stands 670 metres out of flat plain in Namibia with nothing else near it. The rock is still coming off in curved slabs, layer after layer flaking away like the skins of an onion, which is what keeps the peaks around it rounded into domes instead of cutting them into crags. In one place a slab broke clean through a thin fin of rock and left a free-standing arch. At the foot of all this lies a boulder field of granite standing two and three storeys high, with sandy paths winding between the blocks and the thorn trees, and the scale of the place shifting every time you turn a corner. You can scramble the lower domes and the Pontok peaks beside them, hauling yourself up warm smooth rock to a lookout over plain that runs to the horizon. The main summit is a different proposition: nobody stood on it until 1946, and it still takes ropes.
You sleep at the bottom. The community campsites are scattered, each one set into its own pocket of boulders with a fire ring and nothing else — no tap, no light. In the early morning and late afternoon dassies come out to bask on the ledges and klipspringers pick across the steeper faces, and at either end of the day the low sun turns the whole mass rose and then deep copper. After dark the arch is where photographers set up, waiting for the galaxy to stand inside the opening. All of this looked so much like the world before people that Stanley Kubrick's crew used photographs of it for the Dawn of Man sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. People were here, though. San hunter-gatherers painted antelope and hunters in red ochre on these shelters between two and four thousand years ago, the oldest human trace in the Erongo, and decades of scratching and touching have taken most of it. What survives you now reach only with a guide.