Lake Ngami is an

endorheic An endorheic basin ( ; also endoreic basin and endorreic basin) is a drainage basin that normally retains water and allows no outflow to other external bodies of water (e.g. rivers and oceans); instead, the water drainage flows into permanent ...

lake A lake is often a naturally occurring, relatively large and fixed body of water on or near the Earth's surface. It is localized in a basin or interconnected basins surrounded by dry land. Lakes lie completely on land and are separate from ...

Botswana Botswana, officially the Republic of Botswana, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70 percent of its territory part of the Kalahari Desert. It is bordered by South Africa to the sou ...

, north of the

Kalahari Desert The Kalahari Desert is a large semiarid climate, semiarid sandy savanna in Southern Africa covering including much of Botswana as well as parts of Namibia and South Africa. It is not to be confused with the Angolan, Namibian, and South African ...

. It is seasonally filled by the Taughe River, an effluent of the Okavango River system flowing out of the western side of the Okavango Delta. It is one of the fragmented remnants of the ancient Lake Makgadikgadi. Although the lake has shrunk dramatically beginning from 1890, it remains an important habitat for birds and wildlife, especially in flood years.

Visits

Lake Ngami had many famous visitors during the 19th (and into the 20th) century. In 1849 David Livingstone described it as a "shimmering lake, some long and 20 0 kmwide". Livingstone also made a few cultural notes about the people living in this area; he noticed they had a story similar to that of the Tower of Babel, except that the builders' heads were "cracked by the fall of the scaffolding" (''Missionary Travels'', chap. 26). One of the illustrations is known to have been made on the basis of a sketch by Mr. Alfred Ryder (1825-1850) son of Artist, William Mills Rider (1795 - 1841), a young Englishman who had visited the Lake Ngami just a few months before Livingstone arrived there. He had died on his way back. Ryder had made a sketch of the lake and although it was left unfinished, Livingstone persuaded Mrs. Ryder to lend it for the illustration of his book.8 Besides carefully copying the lake scenery, the artist employed by Murray was asked to add a family group into the picture to make it more suitable for Livingstone's purposes.Tait's Edinburgh magazine - Volume 24 - Page 727: "The missionary travelled 60 miles to administer relief, but he arrived after Mr Alfred Rider a young artist to at penetrated Africa to Sketch its scenery had perished. The volume contains a sketch of Ngami engraved from his drawing, which was unfinished at his death. Charles John Andersson (who published
Lake Ngami; or, Explorations and Discoveries during Four Years' Wanderings in the Wilds of Southwestern Africa
' in 1856) and Frederick Thomas Green also visited the area in the early 1850s. Frederick Lugard led a British expedition to the lake in 1896. Arnold Weinholt Hodson passed through the area on his journey from Serowe to Victoria Falls in 1906. Ngami Lacuna, a

methane Methane ( , ) is a chemical compound with the chemical formula (one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). It is a group-14 hydride, the simplest alkane, and the main constituent of natural gas. The abundance of methane on Earth makes ...

lake on

Saturn Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant, with an average radius of about 9 times that of Earth. It has an eighth the average density of Earth, but is over 95 tim ...

's moon Titan, is named after this lake.

References

External links

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The Ngami Times
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