Benedict Allen had heard that Namibia was inhospitable – but that was all rumour, wasn’t it? He soon found out…

Back in 1995, an extraordinary thing happened. I was given permission to travel the length of the Namib, an interesting stretch of the southwest African coast that’s in part scattered with diamonds. Such authorisation had never been granted before, so this was a huge privilege.

There were, I grant you, aspects of the journey which some might consider troubling. For example, for six weeks I’d be travelling alone but for my camels, and quite a few diamond hunters from earlier in the century had died miserably out there.

Also off-putting for the more fainthearted was the desert’s nickname: “The Skeleton Coast”. But this, I was reassured, was just journalistic nonsense. Yes, I’d find the shoreline perpetually fogbound and littered with shipwrecks, but mostly these were only “insurance jobs”. Crews steered their vessels on to the desolate beach, then somehow got a lift home. Nor should I be discouraged by the end-stretch – labelled on my map “The Shore of the Dead”. Not much died there, because not much lived there – except for brown hyenas (lonesome-looking, prowling creatures with conspicuous manes) and washed-up seals.

So I took heart as I marched off into the magnificent rock lands and mountainous dune seas of Namibia, all excited to observe the famous elephants, Hartmann’s zebra and those clever little beetles you read about – and kept a revolver handy for any lions. If attacked, I was to offer my left arm, then calmly shoot my ravenous assailant through the head.

I came across some of the deceased humans early on. There they were – or anyway, their sun-bleached skulls, last remaining hanks of hair tugged by the relentless wind. Their shovels were still standing, as if to attention, beside them.

Time went by. And sometimes as I walked I discovered, scattered at my feet, the delicate shell discs that had once formed the necklaces of since departed nomads – and this I found immensely reassuring.

Children had once giggled and played in this stark terrain that now seemed so intent on punishing me. Already my face was blackened and lips bleeding.

But the wide skies and ochre panoramas were captivating, and I could take cheer from the experience of the German geologists who, at the outbreak of the Second World War, decided that rather than submit to a dreary internment camp they would eke it out right here in the Kuiseb Canyon.

Henno Martin and Hermann Korn had hidden away, along with dog Otto, between these very cliffs and for a while lived quite tolerably as cavemen. The two scientists ate raw flesh, sipped water from springs – while others descended into their own type of Stone

Age savagery, fighting it out in Europe and elsewhere.

After two and a half years the Germans gave up – one of them had contracted beriberi – but to the end their seemingly empty world had been to them beautiful even in its cruelty. And this provided me with a wonderful reminder, so well expressed in the title of the resulting book, The Sheltering Desert, that the wilderness so often provides spiritual nourishment as well as physical deprivation.

As I continued further – the Namib is 1,000 miles long, at least the way I walked it, avoiding stones – I considered others I had come across who’d found sanctuary in the Middle of Nowhere. In the Amazon there had been a bunch of robbers – as their raft drifted by, the whole outfit waved cheerily, safe in the knowledge that while the trail grew cold they might just snooze or enjoy a spot of hunting and fishing.

Of course, it’s not so easy to make good your escape in a desert – although that hadn’t stopped a gang of thieves recently giving it a go in these parts. It was near here that they built a fire against the night’s chill, and even barbecued some rump steak – for there is nothing so lovely before reclining under the African skies than a bit of roast kudu. They went to sleep around the campfire, replete.

They never woke up. They had been asphyxiated by the euphorbia used as firewood.

The moral, I decided, as I limped onward to my journey’s end, is that while a place as breathtakingly bleak as the Namib might tolerate you, “sheltering” is not the same as “setting up home for good”. Save that possibility for the indigenous people, who have skills learnt from infancy.

For the rest of us, the desert remains our master. Sooner or later, we will need to hand ourselves in.

Ghostly coast: the Namibian shoreline is littered with countless shipwrecks