Boers and Germans, whose territories surrounded the region, wanted nothing to do with it. Mier’s de facto jurisdiction fell under the autocracy of a Kaptein or chief by the name of Dirk Vilander. His capital, where Farini convalesced for a few days, was the hamlet of Rietfontein, which still exists. It is on the border with Namibia and a little to the west of the twenty-five-kilometre-long Hakskeen Pan.
From Vilander’s headquarters, Farini and co. embarked on a protracted hunting spree in the vast area that now makes up the Botswana section of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park to the north and west of the Nossob River. Their point of departure from the left bank of the Nossob valley, wrote Farini, was Ki-Ki (pronounced kai-kai). It also still exists – as a water hole in the game park – but with the modern spelling Kij-Kij.
After a couple of weeks of hunting in the scattered wood and grasslands north of the Nossob somewhere to the southwest of Lehututu, shooting almost anything that wandered in front of his rifle’s crosshairs, Farini returned via Kij-Kij to Rietfontein. It was on the return journey, before the party reached Kij-Kij, and in the general area where I had just been, that Farini discovered the ruins. He even marked it with the word ‘ruins’ on the map that appears in his book and on the one he submitted with his paper to the Royal Geographical Society. On both maps ‘ruins’ appears alongside a watercourse running from north to south into the Nossob River, and next to what appears to be a pan.
The description of the ruins in Through the Kalahari Desert is dealt with almost as swiftly and without much more flourish than in the paper presented to the two geographical societies. It’s as though Farini added it to relieve the monotony of his endless hunting escapades that dominate this section of the narrative. He did, however, provide some more information about the stone relics, describing them as “a Chinese wall after an Earthquake” and that they were “quite extensive”. In his book, instead of the ruins being described as an eighth of a mile long, as stated in the papers, they mysteriously become a mile long; and the flat-sided stones are now joined together by cement.
Three other crucial elements stand out in the book’s account of the ruins. Firstly, there’s a sketch of the ruins, apparently from a photograph taken by Lulu. In the foreground, on the right, is a rectangular block balancing precariously on a stone column with others lying about on the ground around it. In the middle ground of the drawing the pavement mentioned by Farini intersects at right angles to form a cross, but, tellingly, no altar is depicted. A stone stump of what seems like a roundish fluted column sits in the background among some bushes. This is the image that has come to define the Lost City. Unfortunately, the corresponding photograph is not to be found in the National Archives collection.
The second thing unique to the book is that Farini provides more detail on the location of his ruins. He states that when they stumbled upon them, they were three days north of the Ki-Ki Mountain, a well-known landmark presumably next to the waterhole of the same name. The ruins themselves were discovered two days after they left a forested belt similar to the one I had spent the night in. As they moved south, the trees became “more and more scanty”. One of Farini’s Baster attendants had thought they were already at Ki-Ki Mountain but Farini claims “they were not far enough south for that.” This false Ki-Ki Mountain “turned out to be one that nobody seemed to have ever seen or heard of”. After they left the false one they reached the real Ki-Ki mountains, having “travelled all the way over a gentle slope” for a further three days. There they found the reservoir with enough water in it to enjoy “the delight of a real swim, after having been many months without one…”
The third element was that Farini, an aspiring poet, proffers three verses of doggerel, which give the only true insight into what his opinion of the ruins was:
A half-buried ruin – a huge wreck of stones
On a lone and desolate spot;
A temple – or a tomb for human bones
Left by man to decay and rot.
Rude sculptured blocks from the red sand project,
And shapeless uncouth stones appear,
Some great man’s ashes designed to protect,
Buried many thousand a year.
A relic, maybe of a glorious past,
A city once grand and sublime,
Destroyed by an Earthquake, defaced by the blast,
Swept away by the hand of time.
It’s the first time the word ‘city’ is mentioned in reference to the ruins.
After their hunting foray, the party journeyed south along what, on Farini’s map, is marked the ‘Hygap River’ but is now recognised as the lower reaches of the Molopo. Farini reached the Orange River at the Augrabies Falls. After some days there, the party returned to Cape Town via Hopetown with a pair of what Farini called ‘Earthmen’ – otherwise known as ‘Bushmen’. These diminutive folk were San-speaking hunter-gatherers from the Lake Ngami area who apparently agreed to accompany Farini by ship to London.
Farini’s book was fairly widely read after its publication in March 1886, and by and large received favourable reviews, but intriguingly without much, or any, curiosity about what was potentially a significant discovery. A fair amount of interest was taken in other aspects of the book, such as the details of the landscape, the different people he encountered, the fauna, and in particular, the flora. Farini was an accomplished botanist and was able to record in minute detail a vast array of plant species he came across. Informed sources at the time, notably the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, the founder of British geographical botany and a close friend and associate of Charles Darwin, declared it “a standard work on the subject of the Kalahari”.
While it is strange that there was a distinct lack of fanfare surrounding Farini’s discovery of the ruins, it is even more curious that when he arrived back in England (on 13 August 1885) from his Kalahari adventure, the streets of London were bedecked with posters and billboards announcing the imminent publication of “The Most Amazing Book Ever Written”.
But it was not Farini’s book. The novel, which was to cause a storm of fictional Lost City mania, was King Solomon’s Mines, penned by Henry Rider Haggard, who, just two years before, had spent a considerable amount of time in southern Africa. The book became that year’s bestseller; it was so much in demand that the publishers could not print copies fast enough. King Solomon’s Mines was scribbled hurriedly as a result of a five-shilling wager that he could write a book half as good as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Presumably he won the wager, and the book earned him a knighthood. So good was the book that its success continued well beyond the century, and it is still remarkably popular today. It even created a new literary genre known as the ‘Lost World’, one that would inspire the creators of my boyhood literary heroes: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and HP Lovecraft. Haggard’s book became the subject and title of a Hollywood film, not once but six times, and has heavily influenced blockbuster movies such as the Indiana Jones series.
The story of King Solomon’s Mines is a classic Victorian adventure about a journey into the uncharted swathes of Africa. The main character, Allan Quatermain, two friends and a couple of servants embark on an epic adventure into the unknown hinterland of southern Africa, which leads them across a great desert, where they almost die of thirst, into an isolated fertile valley inhabited by a disconnected Zulu tribe. The tribe is ruled by an evil pretender to the throne who wants to kill the party, which somehow survives. There’s the usual fictional stuff involving clandestine intrigue, a bloody battle, a love scene and a happy ending for the maligned tribe. But then the story gets really interesting.
The
