of all sizes and colours, sand and dust and seeds from the everlasting grass. These seeds choked the radiator and caused it to boil incessantly, so that we had to protect it with a sheet of fine metal gauze.”
Other explorers in motor vehicles recorded great difficulty getting through the endless dunes. Green, who travelled in the 1930s, said they struggled to make forty kilometres in a day, and a team thirty years later fared no better, recording that on good days they travelled forty-three kilometres a day in a Jeep. Surprisingly, in his paper to the Royal Geographical Society, Farini claimed that he had covered roughly the same daily distance: “On average we covered from twenty to twenty-five miles a day, and when the sand was firmer than usual, increased our speed in proportion.” (Elsewhere he claims to have covered a daily average of twenty-five to thirty miles.)
This last bit of information concerning Farini’s daily mileage was a light-bulb moment. Instead of dashing naively into the desert trying to search aimlessly around some general coordinates, it struck me that I ought to have studied Farini’s text a little more closely – landmarks, travelling times per day and other observations would provide much better clues about the location of the Lost City. Also, Green’s reference to this Paver guy, who seemed to know something about the desert, made me realise that I needed to study the expedition results of the other, more thorough searchers for Farini’s ruins. Paton and co. did not cut the mustard in that department, but Paver seemed to be the right sort of chap to investigate further.
Way back in 1933, Frederick Righton Paver, with his friend Dr Meent Borcherds, had assiduously planned to get to the bottom of Farini’s mystery. Paver was a newspaper reporter and amateur archaeologist who became obsessed with Farini’s ruins. He spent the best part of his life collecting a wealth of information about the Lost City; information I was itching to get my hands on.
Borcherds was a long-time resident of Upington, the principal town on the banks of the Orange River, and a town that Farini had passed through on his way back from the Kalahari. By the 1930s Borcherds had also collected a wealth of anecdotal evidence proving, in his mind, that the ruins were real. But unlike me, Paver and Borcherds had carefully studied Farini’s map and found it woefully inaccurate. In his paper to the Royal Geographical Society – which the chairman read out because its author was unable to attend – Farini admitted that he had not managed to obtain a decent map in London before embarking on his journey. Only when he returned from the Kalahari did he buy one in Berlin, compiled by Justus Perthes of Gotha. Farini then sketched his route on the map, as best he could remember, and presented it alongside his paper. For the British presentation, W & AK Johnston of Edinburgh supplied the map, but it was essentially the same chart.
Paver noted, however, that the grid lines for plotting coordinates were not accurate on either of these maps, which meant that Farini’s estimated fixes were automatically sixty to a hundred kilometres out. There were other errors too. For example, the confluence of the Nossob and Auob (printed as Oup) was incorrectly placed after the confluence with the Molopo River, when in fact the two rivers meet well before they reach the Molopo at Twee Rivieren, about five kilometres before the current entrance to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park.
Paton said Farini did not have a sextant. It wasn’t listed on his detailed inventory that included even minor items such as buttons, bolts and the number of spoons and bullets. However, Farini does mention in his paper to the Royal Geographical Society that Fritz Landwehr, the German trader accompanying them, was “of great assistance in using the sextant and fixing our daily position”. We don’t know how accurate Landwehr was in plotting a daily fix or whether Farini faithfully copied the information on his map, but even if they were meticulous, owing to the flaws in the maps of the day their data was always going to be inaccurate. Essentially, when laying out maps in the 1880s, the cartographers were guessing. They were genuinely dealing with terra incognita.
Farini even acknowledged this in his book when he reproduced this little rhyming stanza by Jonathan Swift:
Geographers on Africa’s maps
With savage pictures fill their gaps;
And o’er uninhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
Farini’s map was therefore of little help, so we went back home and I returned to the drawing board.
Chapter Four
Ancient Mariners
During that first foray into the vast, waterless Kalahari landscape, something began to niggle me about Farini’s find. Why would a city suddenly sprout up in the middle of a desert? It would have been impossible to effectively build one in such an arid environment. Perhaps, like the villagers at Lehututu had done, the ancients sank deep wells in the pans or dry riverbeds. But these would not have been enough to support a trading town of even a moderate size and, in any case, where and with whom could these desert-dwellers have traded?
Farini wrote in the introduction to Through the Kalahari that the promise of diamonds had prompted him to undertake the expedition. He was inspired by what sounds like a King Solomon’s Mines tale related to him by a Baster interpreter named ‘Kert’ (Gert) Louw, who was touring the United States with a freak-show troupe of San-speaking ‘pygmies’ – of which more later. Louw, a native of the Mier region, said he knew of a place in the Kalahari where there were many diamonds. He claimed to have found one weighing 188 carats. At first, Farini did not believe him, but when he rifled through Louw’s belongings and found several stones he immediately made up his mind. Within a couple of weeks he and Lulu were sailing for Africa, with Louw in tow.
Diamonds may have been one reason for an ancient trading civilisation to set up shop in the Kalahari. But diamonds don’t quench thirsts. How a city could have developed without water was a mystery. I was not the only one confounded. Almost all the previous searchers contemplated this problem with varying degrees of gravity. Out of this an interesting theory developed, shared by intellectuals and those prone to bouts of whimsy. It contained all the elements of an intriguing plot for a work of fiction, and Wilbur Smith used it to great effect in The Sunbird.
The first person to take an earnest interest in Farini’s ruins was a British-born professor of geology at Rhodes University in South Africa, Ernest Hubert Lewis Schwarz. He was a veteran of Kalahari exploration and, like Farini, firmly believed the Kalahari could be ‘reclaimed’ for commercial agriculture. The professor, however, took his scheme much further. In an effort to stimulate commercial agriculture, Schwarz thought it possible to divert the Okavango, Cunene and Zambezi rivers south through the Kalahari and all the way into the Orange River system. Schwarz believed that these great rivers in south-central Africa had flowed perennially north to south through the Kalahari, after which they joined the Nossob-Molopo-Kuruman river system. He called this ancient super-river the Hygap, after the name for the lower Molopo printed on Farini’s Justus Perthes map.
Based on this theory, it was conceivable that ancient maritime nations had navigated up the mighty river system, starting at the mouth of the Orange, all the way into the heart of the Kalahari. After reading Farini’s description of the ruins, Schwarz hypothesised that, given the cyclopean character of the ruins, particularly a fluted column, the Lost City could have been a riverside trading post. On a grander scale, perhaps even the bustling port of a Mediterranean civilisation facilitating the flow of diamonds and other goods down the Hygap-Orange river system, then up the African coastline through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean. Farini’s mention of the Hercules Falls added to Schwarz’s picture.
Unlikely as it sounds, this theory was not implausible. The Orange River may not be navigable today but at one time it was. If, as Schwarz believed, the Okavango, Cunene and Zambezi at one time flowed into the Orange, then the river would have been much wider than it is today. Indeed, there is geological
