they are the remains of a disconnected Phoenician civilisation – the last remnants of Carthage – that once flourished in the Kalahari before it vanished. Like Farini, the archaeologists present their findings to a panel of the Royal Geographical Society and explain that a Phoenician leader, fleeing from the yoke of Rome after the Third Punic War in 176 BC with 9,000 supporters, sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and down the west coast of Africa “probably establishing trading stations on the Gold, Ivory and Nigerian coasts…” Then, following Schwarz’s hypothesis about the original drainage system of the Kalahari, Smith writes that two years after setting out, the Carthaginian refugees reached the mouth of a placid river, possibly the Orange, and sailed up it for sixteen days “dragging their ships bodily through the shallows until finally they reached a mighty lake”. There they found “an unpopulated vacuum” and diamonds in the gravel on the edge of the lake (in reality there’s a flourishing diamond mine called Orapa on the shores of the Makgadikgadi), with vast herds of elephant. They sent metallurgists east into the highlands of Manica Province in present-day Zimbabwe, where they discovered great seams of gold-bearing rock. They built a city on the banks of the lake, calling it Opet, and a nearby tribe “of gentle yellow people” welcomed them. However, over the decades the city-state begins to degenerate. It becomes lawless and seditious before mysteriously disappearing without a trace.
Smith’s fiction is based on Schwarz’s fact. At least this is what I excitedly came to believe. I began to plan my second Lost City adventure. This time the aim was to complete what Schwarz had set out to discover: to find those fossil streams that once flowed from the north into the Nossob River. I believed Farini’s Phoenician port city would be found on the banks of such a ‘river’.
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