Elephants in the Desert? It’s No Mirage : Africa: A mythical air surrounds the giant mammals on the Skeleton Coast, habitat for a surprising variety of wildlife.

Suddenly, over the shimmering horizon on Africa’s Skeleton Coast, two big bull elephants hurry across the sand dunes.

Approaching water, all semblance of elephantine dignity evaporates. They plow downslope, half-sliding with rear legs bent, skating on their front legs, sand flying everywhere. At the bottom they charge into the water hole, splashing and carrying on like giant children.

“We longed to find the animals where they have never been filmed--trekking through the sand dunes like some lost caravan from a bygone century,” said photographers Des and Jen Bartlett. They have been living on the Skeleton Coast and filming it for eight years.

The Skeleton Coast, where desert and ocean collide in an unexpected variety of wildlife, stretches along southwestern Africa in Namibia. The region takes its name from the doomed ships, crashed aircraft and bleached whale bones that litter it.

Elephants in the desert? In an area of the northern Namib Desert known as the Kaokoveld, such apparitions are not mirages. Neither are the giraffes that haunt the barren plains or the black rhinoceroses that ascend rocky slopes. Lions roam to the seashore to hunt or scavenge seals and other marine mammals.

Though the wildlife ranges from the Atlantic coast eastward through the Kaokoveld’s immense interior, the animals are protected only within the small 300-mile-long, 25-mile-wide strip that makes up Skeleton Coast Park.

Using the park as their base, the Bartletts, husband and wife, drove a pair of four-wheel-drive vehicles and flew two lightweight Drifter planes the equivalent of twice around the world to find the wildlife in the 19,000 square miles of the northern Namib. They made monthlong camping trips into the desert.

To move in on the remarkable desert-adapted elephants was the Bartletts’ highest priority. Only in West Africa, on the fringe of the Sahara, do any other elephants exist in such an environment.

“An aura of myth surrounds these elephants, which were once thought to have larger feet and longer legs than others of their kind,” the Bartletts said. During the dry season, these desert-dwellers can go without water for three to four days.

South African zoologist P.J. Viljoen told of once following a group of elephants to a watering hole: “It was completely dry, but it didn’t faze them a bit. They knew where the the next water hole was, even though they hadn’t visited it for a year. I followed them until they reached it--38 miles away.”

“These sandblasted creatures are tough,” the Bartletts said. Although their numbers have dwindled alarmingly over the decades--ivory poaching and legal trophy hunting helped diminish them from about 300 in 1970 to about 70 in 1984--the animals survived severe drought and now number about 80 in the western Kaokoveld.

Much of the life, great and small, on the Skeleton Coast would be impossible without another vital source of water besides permanent desert springs--Atlantic fog.

Fog condensed on the leaves of acacia trees helps fulfill the water needs of giraffes that feed on them. Fog condenses on dune ants that drink droplets from one another’s bodies--one of the desert’s unique rites of survival. At night, some tenebrionid beetles stand on their heads in the fog, allowing water to condense on their bodies and trickle into their mouths.

One chilly night while camping among the dunes, the Bartletts had a rude awakening. “What’s that?” Jen Bartlett sat bolt upright. A menacing growl came in reply, and there was a quick movement close to their bedrolls. Des Bartlett shined a flashlight on a big male lion. The Bartletts headed for one of their vehicles. The lion finally sauntered off, roaring defiantly.

Such an incident is a small encounter “in a longstanding conflict between man and lion, and in Skeleton Coast Park the lions seem to have lost,” the Bartletts said. “When we first arrived, at least a dozen lions lived there. Now there are none.”