travel writer and author of non-fiction Africana Lawrence Green, who was also a Lost City enthusiast. Before he embarked on his expedition in 1936, another searcher by the name of Frederick Paver, who had gone before, warned him: “When you see the country, you realise that one could spend months searching the sand dunes without covering a fraction of the area in which the lost city may be situated.” Paver was dead right. Standing on the roof of our truck surveying the endless empty landscape, it was no mystery to us why these ruins had yet to be found.
At dusk we set up camp, lit a crackling fire and enjoyed a glass of wine. It would become the most familiar pattern of every one of our Kalahari travels. Spurfowl clucked around our tent like domestic chickens, and the ambient sound of a hundred toktokkie beetles tapping their armoured abdomens on the ground – tok-tok-tok – added to the orchestra of crickets. A hyena cackled in the distance, and a nightjar followed his lead with a quavering call. This empty desert was pure bliss, and even though our mission might be a complete failure, we were content. The pattern would repeat itself night after night, expedition after expedition.
We spent the rest of the days roaming about the area, just to make sure, but we knew we were wasting our time. We followed the full length of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park’s northern boundary and the entire area of the game park of Mabuasehube. For some strange geographical reason, Mabuasehube is elevated slightly from the surrounding desert. The rectangular shape of parkland seems incongruous with the rest of the Transfrontier Park. Originally it was a park in its own right and was officially incorporated into the Transfrontier Park only in the year 2000, though no fences have ever divided the two wilderness areas. Mabua is renowned for its series of circular pans, some the size of cricket fields, others several kilometres in diameter. It has a number of A-frame campsites with pit-latrines and a place to hang a shower. We were fortunate to get one at the edge of a pan after which the park is named. Mabuasehube Pan is about two kilometres in diameter and is the only one that is red. The others are either chalky white or covered in grass and all look like lunar craters when viewed from above. This red pan does not have a blade of grass on it – it’s completely barren. There were vultures hanging about though, like grim reapers waiting for something to die. I decided to nickname this red pan Dead Pan.
On the western rim of the pan are some limestone outcrops. This was the first time we had come across anything other than fine sand. If the ancients needed to build a city, they would have needed hard material to hew building blocks from. This pan provided evidence of such material. The rocky outcrop gave me a glimmer of hope that the city was still out here somewhere.
During this trip, when not heaving through the sand in the truck, I could usually be found swinging from a hammock, most often in the deep shade of a camelthorn tree. I was rereading the colourful accounts Farini and Paton had written about their journeys, and comparing theirs with mine. Farini’s buckwagon was the Victorian version of my solid expedition vehicle. It had smaller wheels in the front than at the back and was “of strong build and the wood well-seasoned”. He had a team of fifty oxen that hauled two wagons but not all the oxen were inspanned at the same time. They were rotated in order to rest them from the grinding work. Leather sheaths were fitted to the wheels of the wagons to make them wider and therefore easier to pull over the sand. Farini, of course, wasn’t able to carry drums of water as we could – at least not enough to ensure the survival of his entire entourage for a few months in the desert, including his fifty oxen, four horses and a pack of hunting dogs. It would simply be too heavy for the draught animals to haul through the sand. The entire party, both man and beast, had to rely on tsamma, the life-blood of the Kalahari. The tsamma is a species of watermelon. We saw many growing in patches alongside the tracks. They look like watermelons, but they are more spherical and slightly smaller and are found in a number of varieties throughout the desert regions of Africa. They are the ancestors of the watermelons found in modern grocery stores and supermarkets. The Ancient Egyptians cross-pollinated the wild varietal with the sweet fleshy pink watermelon most of us know. The flesh of the tsamma is much harder, whiter and very bitter – I don’t like it. Farini found they tasted best when roasted before being squeezed. Then, by adding a little suet and milk, it “makes quite a refreshing beverage…[and] quenches the thirst better than water”.
During the summer months when thunderstorms are prevalent, tsamma melons tend to grow in large patches and are fairly widespread. Farini’s train of oxen would therefore move exclusively according to their location. It wasn’t all plain sailing though. At times the patches were hard to come by, either because the thunderstorms had not been good in that area or the desert ungulates, the springbok, gemsbok and wildebeest, had got to them first. Farini lost a good number of his beasts, as well as his prize horse, to thirst. On one occasion, when he was separated from his caravan and got lost, he too almost succumbed. He was found in the nick of time, unconscious but alive.
While we have the luxury of carrying gallons of water with us, the food and how we cook it are almost unchanged since Farini’s day. It occurred to me one evening when cooking over the open fire that I owned a piece of equipment common to all African explorations before, during and since Farini’s 1885 journey. It is the black three-legged cast-iron cooking pot called a potjie – little pot – an invaluable and timeless piece of exploration equipment. The design is simple but supremely effective as the object can withstand decades of being placed in fires daily without ever needing to be replaced or repaired. Furthermore, the tripod design of the legs means that the pot remains upright among flaming logs and coals throughout the duration of cooking, and you don’t have to worry that it may tip over and tumble all its contents into the fire. Three legs are more stable than four; ask any wildlife or landscape photographer who has to balance and set hi-tech equipment over uneven ground. Paton’s expedition had a potjie, which they used to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner, as did Farini. His servants would boil an entire steenbok slowly in the pot until the flesh became tender and separated from the bone. Like the desert ungulates, Amanda and I are plant-eaters. We would enjoy rice and a medley of vegetables, herbs and spices thrown haphazardly into the potjie and cooked slowly to make a hodgepodge of swirling flavours and textures. When travelling, the soot-blackened pot is wedged firmly in the rim of my spare wheel on the roof. Farini’s was hitched to the back of the wagon on a hook.
Farini’s wagon, like my vehicle, had a side awning that could be rolled out for shade, and it carried everything from guns, ammunition (15,000 rounds, no less), tools, a spade, an axe, some rope, a first-aid kit and lanterns to concertinas, mouth-organs, eau de cologne, and a small cask of South African brandy – a roughly distilled potion called Cape Smoke. For someone who had never been to Africa before, nor tried his hand at exploration, Farini was certainly well prepared for a comfortable life in the desert.
Farini was much better equipped than Paton’s 1956 expedition. A comparison between the inventories of their supplies highlights the difference. Farini’s is extensive, like the stock-take of a general trading store. Paton’s team only listed ten items, which also included arms and ammunition. Their journey was perhaps the worst-prepared of all Lost City expeditions. Not that it was Paton’s fault. Sailor Ibbetson was the man in charge and he turned out to be a royal swindler. After promises of a sponsorship for a brand-new seven-ton truck by Leyland Motor Corporation, Ibbetson instead procured a battered, coarsely painted, psychedelic Austin jalopy, which the party nicknamed Kalahari Polka. Poor Paton ended up paying for the vehicle out of his own pocket and was tricked into forking out for most of the expedition’s other expenses too.
The Kalahari Polka was a terrible machine that overheated and broke down repeatedly but somehow managed to traverse almost 4,800 kilometres over the most treacherous sandy tracks. It was a true Kalahari adventure where the members endured endless hardships – shooting game for the pot and surviving tough all-night travelling conditions (the day was too hot for the engine to run), picking their way slowly through endless dunes and thornveld in the back of the open lorry. In Paton’s words, the journey was “purgatory… thorn branches would excoriate the canopy from end to end, and it sounded like great waves passing alongside and over a struggling ship. At times the gearbox screamed. The desert poured in, through the holes in the ancient sail, thorns of camelthorn and red thorns
