ancient road. After three days of travelling along it, it terminates at the remains of a diamond and gold mine. Beyond it the explorers find the mouth of a great cave and therein they discover a subterranean vault full of diamonds, ivory and gold coins “of a shape that none of us had seen before, and with what looked like Hebrew characters stamped upon them”. The story has another imaginative twist or two before the travellers return safely home.
Ostensibly, Farini’s Through the Kalahari Desert, which hit the shelves six months later, is the non-fiction version of Haggard’s great novel. There are many parallels: crossing the desert, almost dying of thirst, hunting, meeting strange tribes and having countless adventures. As in King Solomon’s Mines, there’s even an unrequited love vignette with the daughter of the local baKgalagadi chief at Lehututu, and of course great relics “of a glorious past”.
Farini’s name aside, the legend of a lost city somewhere in Africa became so well known that, over the course of the next century and a bit, many adventurers went in search of it. I, of the modern era, joined their ranks. As a young boy I had read, with insatiable thirst, the adventures of Tarzan in which the feral lad often came across ruins of great cities from a distant past. The prolific number of Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs first appeared in the early part of the twentieth century and undoubtedly drew inspiration from King Solomon’s Mines, possibly from Farini’s book too. Burroughs was not alone. South Africa’s greatest short-story writer, Herman Charles Bosman, wrote a parody simply entitled Lost City, and later the South African best-selling author of historical fiction Wilbur Smith wrote a lengthy novel entitled The Sunbird, which details the discovery of an unknown ruined city deep in the Kalahari. So entrenched is the legend of a lost city that it has been enshrined in the garish architecture of South Africa’s famed holiday complex – the Palace of the Lost City at Sun City.
Surrounded as I was with such mythology, it was a given, in my literary subconscious at least, that there still existed a ruined city of mysterious origins somewhere in some forgotten corner of the Kalahari; an African Eldorado or Machu Picchu as yet undiscovered. Reading Paton’s non-fictional narrative about his quest to find Farini’s apparently real lost city brought it firmly into my consciousness. I became afflicted with ‘Kalahari fever’, a condition common to those who love to solve a good mystery. You can tell us apart from the common herd. We are the glazed-eyed wanderer, readers of dusty old books and maps who, on a whim, plunge into one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, emerging weeks or months later, haggard and with eyes even more glazed.
I would soon discover – once I understood this condition – that I was not alone. Many had sought out the Lost City. Some had taken their whole family along, while others had searched alone over the course of a lifetime. They either combed the timeless depths of quasi-legendary anecdotes, whispered rumours and tales, or they physically criss-crossed the entire Kalahari basin and beyond. The searchers included distinguished professors, government agents fired up by ideological slants, doctors, outlaws, prospectors, schoolteachers and housewives. The youngest searcher, at two years old, could barely walk; neither could the oldest, who was well into his eighties. As for me, there have been repeated forays. Between 2005 and 2015, I ventured into the desert a dozen or so times, occasionally alone (as in this expedition), but most often with my travelling companion and wife, Amanda. Sometimes I took along friends and family to make the search more festive and less intense, and once I even had a television crew in tow. In short, my search for Farini’s Lost City became an obsession – one that I could not shake.
When I set out on this quest a decade ago, I thought finding the Lost City would be easy. After all, in his paper to the Royal Geograhical Society, the august body that had provided a platform for luminaries of African exploration such as David Livingstone, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, Farini gave exact coordinates for the location of his ruins. He couldn’t have been more precise. I didn’t wonder why the ruins hadn’t ever been found there, or consider that those coordinates lay in a different location from where Farini wrote the word ‘ruins’ on his map. I even ignored the fact that Paton wrote: “Farini had no compass, no sextant, no mathematics; therefore no-one could rely on his observations.” The moment I saw those coordinates I, together with Amanda, rushed off into the Kalahari, destination 23½º South and 21½º East.
Chapter Three
Charting a Lone and Desolate Spot
Like Farini, we were coming into the Kalahari from the south. Cape Town was the point of departure for both expeditions – Farini by rail to Kimberley then by buckwagon. After reaching the dunes beyond the Orange River, he discovered the hard way that oxen were better nineteenth-century-style 4x4s than mules. They were stronger, more resilient and possessed a greater ‘willingness’ when egged on by the sting of a whip about their ears every few seconds. As for me, I had horses – a whole herd of them harnessed very tightly into a metal block beneath the bonnet of a throaty diesel pick-up truck. Compared to Farini’s beasts, mine was a monster.
My route from Cape Town to the Kalahari, which became my favoured one, wasn’t the quickest but it was the most interesting. Eschewing the lorry-laden Cape-to-Namibia tar route that runs roughly up the west coast of South Africa before dog-legging east towards Upington on the Orange River, I chose to venture further inland along the dirt roads of the Tankwa Karoo. Beautiful though it is, the moonscape of the Tankwa is a little unnerving. On one expedition, Amanda and I spent an eerie week camping along an isolated boulder-strewn track up a deep valley dominated by the high cliffs of the Roggeveld Mountains. It was memorable, though a little intimidating. Total isolation in nature does weird things to the mind. On a later trip, when I took an American network television presenter to the Kalahari to look for the Lost City, we stopped at an eclectic Tankwa padstal that had a proprietor who looked like an extra on the movie Deliverance. When the presenter asked what he could expect from the Kalahari, the man replied – between large gaps in his rotting teeth and puffs of his pipe – “Nothing.”
Incredulous, the presenter looking around at the endless desolation and, with a great sweep of his arm, asked, “What do you call this then?”
“Less than nothing,” was the forthright reply.
After the Tankwa, the vast expanse of horizon and sky continues. Climbing over the escarpment just before the pretty town of Calvinia, one enters the vastness of the Great Karoo where succulents on stony soil slowly give way to desert shrubs and grasses more typical of the Kalahari. The ancient San tribes of the area had an extraordinary sounding name for it: /Xam-ka !au. Colonial settlers who were unable to pronounce the name called it Bushmanland. Though they weren’t particularly interested in the place, they still managed to expel the local population, mostly by killing them. There’s a bleak sand road that snakes past the remote hamlet of Loeriesfontein, then more nothingness before you reach the great falls on the Orange River, a feature the San named ‘Aukoerebis’, the place of great noise. To the modern world, it is ‘Augrabies’ – a mispronunciation by the Dutch settlers who, at least this time, made an attempt to pronounce the word.
The Europeans arrived in this region en masse at around the same time Farini visited the Kalahari. For us, more than a century later, Augrabies was a good place to stop – partly because it was a full day’s drive from Cape Town and would be the last place where we’d see any significant amount of water before entering the Kalahari, and partly because Farini had been there too. Although I couldn’t trace his wagon tracks to the Lost City, I could certainly follow them here. The proof was in the form of Lulu’s wonderful photographs of the falls. They were taken from angles that defy imagination, given that he had to lug a weighty machine, including dry plates, a tripod and cumbersome flashlights over the steep, slippery rocks. Incidentally, Farini had also mispronounced the name of the falls, calling it ‘Hercules’ – perhaps he thought the name originated from a mysterious Mediterranean heritage.
For us, on that first trip, Augrabies was also a place to contemplate what lay ahead. I began to wonder if we had not been a little
