In 1915, as the First World War reached southern Africa, the South African army built a prisoner-of-war camp here to hold German soldiers captured in the campaign for German South West Africa. The prisoners arrived to nothing but tents pitched on the open veld, exposed to the desert's swings from blistering heat to freezing night. Rather than endure it, they set about making the place livable, moulding bricks from the earth and building themselves proper houses, a quiet assertion of dignity by men with little else to control. At its height the camp held around 1,500 prisoners. By May 1919 the last of them had gone home and the camp closed. Today a plaque and a handful of reconstructed houses mark the spot, the only evidence that more than a thousand men once made a town out of captivity here.

West of the village, out on the gravel plains, something moves that has no business surviving there: a herd of wild horses, perhaps 150 to 200 of them, living entirely without human care in a desert that offers neither shade nor reliable water. Their origin is a genuine mystery, pieced together from fragments. The likeliest story runs through the same war that filled the camp. In 1915, thousands of South African troops and their cavalry mounts massed at nearby Garub; when a German aircraft bombed the camp, hundreds of horses are said to have scattered into the desert. Others may descend from a nearby German stud farm at Duwisib, whose owner left for Europe in 1914 and died in the war, abandoning his fine horses to their fate. However they came to be, they stayed.

What makes the horses extraordinary is not that they arrived but that they adapted. Over a century in the Namib has reshaped them into desert animals. They drink far less than domestic horses and can go five days without water at all, conserving moisture in ways their ancestors never needed to. They have learned the rhythm of a place with no margin for error, ranging across the plains and returning to a single lifeline: an artificial waterhole at Garub Pan, fed for their sake. There a viewing blind lets visitors watch the herd come to drink without disturbing them, an intimate look at one of the only populations of feral horses anywhere to have made a true desert their home.

Aus grew slowly into a settled place. It earned village status in 1925 and the rank of a municipality in 1949, and by 1970 counted a population of 767. The Afrikaans-speaking families who arrived in the 1920s found themselves at the far end of an enormous frontier parish; the Dutch Reformed congregation based at Keetmanshoop once stretched some 650 kilometres east to west, across distances so vast that pastors were reluctant to come at all. Ministers shuttled between Aus, Bethanie, and Lüderitz, holding council meetings in rotation, until Aus, central enough to serve as a hub, finally gained its own footing around 1949. The trains that once ran clear through to the coast now stop here at the end of the line, and the village settles back into its desert quiet, keeping watch over its horses and its snow-memory and its bricks made by prisoners a century gone.