Drive west from the Okavango panhandle for an hour on sand, and the flat Kalahari does something it does nowhere else for hundreds of kilometres. It stands up. Four hills of grey and pink quartzite rise out of the scrub, the tallest about four hundred metres above the plain. The people who live at their feet call them the Male, the Female and the Child, and the fourth, smaller and off to one side, is the wife the Male hill left. On their faces and in their overhangs are more than four thousand paintings: eland, giraffe, rhinoceros, a whale that somebody had seen or heard of, and rows of red handprints.

To the Juǀʼhoansi, the hills are where the first people were made, and where the spirits of the dead go to rest. The Hambukushu, who came later, say their god lowered the first people and their cattle onto the Female hill from the sky, and there are marks on the rock they say are the hoofprints. Both peoples agree that the hills have rules. You do not hunt near them. You do not approach without a proper greeting. There is a spring near the Female hill whose water is for cleansing and healing and must not be treated casually. The hills are said to whisper, and the guides will tell you plainly that some things you might see are not for pointing at.

The outsider’s story that fixed the hills in the world’s imagination belongs to Laurens van der Post. In 1955 he led a film expedition into the Kalahari and came to Tsodilo, which he called the Slippery Hills. On the way in his party shot game for the pot, without, as it turned out, asking anybody’s leave. From the moment they reached the hills, he wrote, things went wrong. The cameras jammed, all of them, one after another. Bees came out of the rock in swarms and attacked the camp, day after day. His guide, a local man, told him what he had done and what it meant. Van der Post wrote a formal apology to the spirits of the hills, sealed it in a bottle, and buried it below a panel of paintings. The bees stopped. The cameras worked. He published the story in 1958 in The Lost World of the Kalahari, which is why this entry sits at that year: it is the earliest written account of the hills’ rules we can point to, though the rules are immeasurably older.

Van der Post was a magnificent storyteller and, his biographers have shown, a loose one with facts, so how much of the bees is bees is anybody’s guess. The panel of eland and giraffe he was filming is nonetheless known to this day as the Van der Post panel, and the guides will show you where the bottle is supposed to be.

Archaeologists have been digging at the hills since the 1960s. In 2006 a Norwegian team announced that a python-shaped rock in a cave on the Female hill, with a scatter of burnt spear points below it, was evidence of a ritual seventy thousand years old, the earliest known on earth. Archaeologists who had excavated the same cave said the dating did not hold up and the python was a python only if you wanted it to be. UNESCO had already listed the hills in 2001, as the Louvre of the desert.

The communities at Tsodilo still make offerings at the hills, and still expect visitors to behave. The cameras, these days, mostly work. Mostly.