Adam Cruise
Tafelberg
Author’s Notes & Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the invaluable contributions from the league of extraordinary Lost City searchers who, over the course of a century, sometimes diligently, other times shambolically, tried in vain to locate what essentially is the Eldorado of Africa. In particular, John Clement and Fred Paver, who over their respective lifetimes meticulously collated every little bit of information on the subject and seemed to pluck clues out of nowhere. Their records are reproduced here in detail and they provided much needed direction for my own endeavours in the desert.
More so, it was the giants of African literature – writers of both fiction and non-fiction – that inspired my own desire, or rather obsession, to find the Kalahari’s Lost City. Alan Paton’s posthumously published Lost City of the Kalahari, an erudite travelogue of his own experience trying to unearth the mythical legend, was the ignition that sparked the great pyre of inflammable Lost City tinder piled up over my own lifetime. As a boy I lapped up Henry Rider Haggard’s African adventures of Allan Quatermain and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan. Later came Wilbur Smith’s fictional account of the Kalahari’s Lost City, The Sunbird, based upon real events and theories of the searchers themselves while the non-fictional accounts in Lawrence Green’s South African travel tales and Herman Charles Bosman’s short-story satire subliminally inspired my own dozen or so wide-eyed forays into the heart of the subcontinent.
Then, once my expeditions began in earnest, other writers aided my search. Fay Goldie’s anthology of anecdotes from diaries and interviews of a variety of seekers at the peak of Lost City mania in the 1950s and ’60s was indispensable to my investigations. I am especially indebted to the fastidious research by Canadian author Shane Peacock. He single-handedly unlocked the personality of the leading character of this story, the great but now largely forgotten nineteenth-century showman, G.A. Farini, whose own colourful yet believable account of his find in 1885 made it difficult for the more sceptical of Lost City seekers to refute the existence of an ancient city.
Literature was not the only medium that helped create this book. The Internet proved an excellent resource, especially posts by modern seekers of the city like Greg van Reis’s 2002 expedition with a convoy of four-wheel drives and microlight aircraft. At the other end of the time scale, I uncovered a series of wonderful sepia photographs on Flickr, the online image-hosting service. A member of Farini’s expedition – actually his foster son, Lulu – was an early and talented photographer. His set of photographs now belong to the National Archives of the United Kingdom. While I was unable to reproduce them in this book due to the cost and unfavourable exchange rate, the Flickr images provided visual verification of the landscape and area of Farini’s claim. (If you would like to see them, just search for “Lulu Farini AND Flickr” on Google.) Sketches of the original photographs, although highly stylised, were created for Farini’s French narrative of his adventure in Huit mois au Kalahari (Eight Months in the Kalahari). The most interesting are in this book, and come from a first edition in the Cape Town campus of the National Library of South Africa.
I would like to acknowledge the great contribution of the two Gills: firstly, Gill Moodie, the commissioning editor at Tafelberg, in the creation of this book. She gently goaded, prodded and persuaded me to include more colour and life in an already colourful and vibrant tale; and Gillian Warren-Brown, who, from her idyllic country home in the Eastern Cape, somehow tore her eyes away from the landscape to meticulously pick through my text to ensure the harmony of continuity and style.
Finally, the joy and excitement of my many adventures into the remote depths of the Kalahari were augmented by the steadfast presence of a fellow adventurer, whom I also happen to be married to. This book is dedicated to her.
Chapter One
Lost
The track I was following eventually vanished completely in the tall yellow grass, and with some difficulty I turned the heavy truck around and headed back the way I had come. After a kilometre I found another track, branching off to the left. Though it was also indistinct, and I had no idea where it would take me, I swung the truck and began nosing my way cautiously along the new route. In the searing Kalahari temperatures my GPS had, once again, been fried where it was mounted on the windscreen of the vehicle. Without it, I had to rely on decades-old paper maps drawn by travellers who had, like myself, been foolhardy enough to enter this desert. The maps had seemed reliable enough – until I realised that each presented its own idiosyncratic version of the arid terrain I faced. One told me to look for a turnoff from a dry riverbed at the point where there was a large camelthorn tree. This would be helpful anywhere but the Kalahari, where every dry riverbed is punctuated along its entire length by large camelthorn trees.
However, I knew that the new track was heading roughly north, and north was the general direction I wanted to go. Late that afternoon, I ruptured a tyre on a sharp branch half-buried in the sand. By the time the tyre was repaired, a bank of thunderclouds had rumbled past without breaking. Only a few heavy drops fell, making a sound like lead shot on the bonnet of the truck. I continued driving for another half hour until the sky softened to the pastel violet of dusk, then eased my foot off the accelerator and allowed the sand to bring the truck to a slow halt in a dense thicket of tall trees. With night approaching fast, there was just time to pitch my tent and gather a heap of dry wood. I lit a large fire to keep away the nocturnal predators who had already begun to yip, cackle and roar; then threw some rice and tinned vegetables into a pot. I poured the evening’s obligatory glass of warm wine, leaned back against a twisted log and watched the furnace-red sun sink behind the long grassy ridge of a dune.
Oh well, I thought, I may be lost, but I am precisely where I want to be.
The reason I was in the Kalahari had its roots in a paper delivered to the Berlin Geographical Society on 7 November 1885. The presenter, Gilarmi Antonio Farini, had three months earlier completed what he claimed was an epic journey through southern Africa. Though the paper described a new route into uncharted territory, and the indigenous people encountered along the way, its main and rather prosaic objective was to discuss the feasibility of cattle ranching in the southwest corner of the Kalahari Desert. The author found the area favourable for such an endeavour, despite the waterless nature of the landscape. However, his audiences, both in Berlin and at a similar presentation the following year to the Royal Geographical Society in London, remained single-mindedly unconvinced. As far as the venerable gentlemen were concerned, the explorer’s foray into the Kalahari was a substandard expedition, and nothing new had been discovered – or at least nothing to tempt further consideration. The proposal to turn the area into a second Texas for cattle ranchers was mothballed for good.
Farini would have disappeared into anonymity – at least as an explorer – if it were not for this passage dropped, almost as an afterthought, into the middle of his paper:
While hunting we came across an irregular pile of stones that seemed in places to assume the shape of a wall, and on closer examination we traced what had evidently once been a huge walled enclosure, elliptical in form and about the eighth of a mile in length. The masonry was of a cyclopean character; here and there the gigantic square blocks still stood on each other, and in one instance the middle stone being of a softer nature was weatherworn. A large stone, about six feet in length and the same in width, was balancing on this, and but for its great inertia would have been blown over by the wind. Near the base of the ruined walls were oval shaped rocks, hollowed out, some composed of one solid stone and others of several pieces joined together. These peculiar basin-shaped ovals were regularly distributed every few yards around the entire ellipse. In the middle was a kind of pavement of long
