ESSENTIALS

Cazenove & Loyd

(020 7384 2332; cazloyd. com) is offering a one-week safari holiday in South Africa from £2,500 per person. The price includes five nights at Samara in a luxurious Karoo Suite and two nights at the Drostdy Hotel in Graaff-Reinet, plus internal flights with South African Airways from Johannesburg to

Port Elizabeth and transfers. Return economy-class flights from London Heathrow to Johannesburg with

South African Airways (flysaa.com) from £700. than his bride-to-be and a year younger, with huge paws that still seemed too big for his body, but already he had the makings of a fine mane. We watched him slowly rise to his feet and approach the lioness, greeting her with an affectionate bout of head rubbing until she gave him a grimace, exposing her canines as if to say “That’s enough for now”.

Leaving the cats to their siesta, I set out with Sarah to see what else Samara had to offer. Drought gripped the land. The sun glittered on a million thorns and the wind hissed in the withered yellow grass, but the animals knew where to find water in the hidden pools of the Milk River Valley. Like the Karoo itself, they were incredibly resilient and perfectly at home in the harsh but overwhelmingly beautiful lost world of the Khoisan that Sarah Tompkins is bringing back to life. Bull elands with swinging dewlaps cantered away through dense stands of flowering acacias. Oryx and hartebeest watched us from a distance and blue cranes – elegant birds the colour of wood smoke – filled the air with their sweet-throated cries.

Shepherd’s trees with ghostly white trunks stood out like markers, measuring the illimitable seas of bush, and when we stopped for a midmorning coffee I scanned the mountainsides with my binoculars and found a black rhino. On a distant slope littered with smooth grey boulders it was the only one that moved.

Not long afterwards we found a mother cheetah with five small cubs resting in the shade. Her name was Chilli and I was thrilled to be told she was the daughter of Sibella, who I had met on my first visit to Samara 11 years ago. Sibella had died in 2016, but not before producing 20 cubs and raising all but one to adulthood.

On we drove through wild orchards of jacket plums until we came to Wolwe Kloof (Hyena Valley), toiling in bottom gear up a tortuous pathway to the breezy summit of Kondoa, a miniature Serengeti marooned in the sky along with its cavorting wildebeest herds.

There, a picnic of chicken and chilled sauvignon had been prepared under a canvas awning with stupendous views past dolerite cliffs where kestrels hung in the wind and sentinel baboons kept watch over the Plains of Camdeboo 2,500ft (760m) below. Towards the end of the day we drove back to the boma for one final look at the lions. By the time we arrived the sun was sinking through long reefs of cloud and a warm desert wind had begun to blow.

They were still resting together as we had left them, their flanks backlit in the golden glow as if carved from amber, and whenever the lioness raised her head I would feel her unblinking gaze rifling deep into my soul. “We’ve called the male Titus but we haven’t yet decided on a name for her,” whispered Sarah. “Perhaps you would like to think of one?”

I looked at her sphinx-like silhouette, lying in the last of the light like a benediction, the founder of a new dynasty whose broad footprints would soon blossom along Samara’s dusty game trails and whose thunderous voices would once again echo among the kloofs and hollows of the mountains, telling the world the vanished kings were back where they belonged.

“Let’s call her Sikelele,” I said, “the Xhosa word for blessed.”

FAMILY PORTRAITChilli the cheetah with her cubs, left; the Manor, above