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Lyall Watson – Lightning Bird

There are on earth some places of undeniable power, spots where spirits have made their home.

The people know these places well and have names for them that act as explicit warnings to casual passersby. Some mountains are believed to be so powerful that it is not even necessary to trespass there in order to evoke the wrath of their spirits; it is enough just to point at them

Paramount among these are the ill reputed mountains of the Makgabeng, which rise like stepped pyramids out of a hard brown plain in the Northern Transvaal. They are part of the Waterberg system, standing on an ancient basin filled with the sediments of erosion that took place during unimaginable rains two thousand million years ago. They were formed when bands of sandstone and conglomerate were raised from that early floor and weathered and faulted to produce the typical rugged scenery that remains.

From the steep escarpment of Ga Mokopane in the east almost 5,000 feet above sea level, hundreds of square miles of broken plateaus fall 1500 feet down to the Magalakwena River in the west……

On the plateau there is nothing but bare red sandstone eroded into bizarre shapes which rise like antique monuments, like eroded mausoleums, that disappear one behind the other into the hot summer haze. The tallest of these is Thaba Godimo, ‘the Citadel’, which stands like a sentinel …

To the people of the Makgabeng it is a sacred place. Visible from everywhere within the mountains …. They know it as 

‘Those Who Point Will Never Reach Their Homes