in bygone days. My previous visit to Augrabies Falls had shown that the present-day chute was carved by a volume of water far greater than the Orange River’s present flow. This story is not unique to the Orange.
The Molopo River meets the Orange downstream from the falls, and it was there that I made a breathtaking discovery while working with a group of Americans. They had organised a Lidar plane so we could create a high-resolution map of the landscape from the air. Lidar (light detection and ranging) technology uses a pulsing laser light to measure distances to the Earth, essentially surveying the ground surface to help pinpoint features that are otherwise difficult to detect. I had wanted to check out Schwarz’s theory and see if the perennially dry Molopo could, in the ancient past, have been a river with a permanent and significant flow of water. Once we were airborne it quickly became apparent that Lidar was not required. The naked eye did just fine. What I discovered is that for a river that hardly gets more than a trickle of water each century, it boasts an impressively deep gorge that must be about a hundred metres deep in places. It has huge sunbaked granite walls smoothed by what could only have been a powerful cascade of water. It reminded me of the deep, burnished granite gorges just below the Augrabies.
The terrain was even more impressive from the ground. When we hiked into the gorge it felt as if we were in an ancient landscape that was once well watered. We even discovered some ruins. It was nothing much, just a couple of tumbledown walls in what appeared to be a small settlement, with some rudimentary graves. But, as the presenter and I discussed on camera, they did not match Farini’s description. Certainly there were no fluted columns or Maltese Cross-patterned pavements. The structures, though, would definitely have been there in 1885. Farini would have passed through this gorge on his way to the Augrabies Falls so it’s likely he saw them too.
It was obvious to us that, at one time, the Molopo had either been prone to flash floods or it had enjoyed a mighty, permanent flow. Schwarz may have been right; the entire Zambezi, Okavango and Cunene river system could easily have flowed all the way down here, culminating in this canyon before joining the Orange River.
It’s not only the geological evidence that supports Schwarz’s theory. It is common knowledge among historians that the Phoenicians were great ocean explorers. They were the first navigators to venture beyond the Pillars of Hercules – the promontories flanking the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar – an amazing feat at the time. Even today, navigating through the Strait under sail is a challenge. Billions of litres of water from the Atlantic funnel through the narrow passage between Europe and Africa, creating a ripping current. This, combined with a contrary tide, is downright hazardous to modern yachts, let alone sailing vessels from antiquity. After passing through the strait, the Phoenicians navigated as far as the British Isles and Ireland, where they traded for tin. We know too that they traded for gold along the West African coast at least as far as Cameroon. Moreover, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, a Phoenician expedition 2,500 years ago, funded by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II, set sail from the Red Sea and inched its way down the east coast of Africa. After three years it returned to Egypt, but disembarked on the Mediterranean side. The intrepid explorers had circumnavigated the continent. Thus, the coasts of Africa, on both sides, were known to these great ocean navigators, and it is quite feasible that they could have sailed up a navigable river.
Here’s where the diamond and ancient watercourse theories come together. The lure of diamonds may well have provided the impetus for an exploration up the Orange River. Many Lost City seekers have leant towards this view. In To the River’s End, Green observes that the lower Orange River, called the Sperrgebiet, is closed to the public, and has been since German colonial times. Between Lüderitz in Namibia and Alexander Bay in South Africa it is forbidden for anyone without special permission to enter the 30,000-square-kilometre stretch of desert. Why? Because of the great abundance of alluvial diamonds washed down by an ancient flow that cascaded over the blue Kimberlite pipes that here and there pierce the Earth’s crust in and around the Kalahari.
Another aspect of Schwarz’s theory is that the entire million-square-kilometre Kalahari Desert forms a giant bowl-like depression. Farini himself noted that the country rose slightly as he crossed over the western lip of the desert at Tunobis. The sands of the desert swallow the Okavango River, which flows into the bowl from the northwest, forming a massive delta. But the river once flowed much further, filling the huge Makgadikgadi Salt Pans to the east, making it a giant lake. This lake was even bigger than the 5,000-square-kilometre expanse of the present-day pans, which already make up some of the largest on the planet. Evidence of the old shoreline is still visible along the Boteti River, the dry river course that was once the shrinking Okavango River’s channel to the Makgadikgadi.
Geologists generally agree that Lake Ngami, far to the west of the Makgadikgadi, is a remnant of this super-lake. Even by the mid-1800s, when Livingstone first came upon Ngami, it was much bigger than it is today, which suggests that the entire system has slowly been draining away. The reasons are not well understood but it is thought there has been a slow tilting of the Earth’s crust that has prevented the waters of the Okavango from reaching the lake, and perhaps even (as Schwarz believed) that the tilting caused the Cunene, Linyanti, Chobe and Zambezi rivers to be diverted from their otherwise southward trajectory. Farini also appears to have believed this – he commented that a rise in the land at Tunobis was the “cause of Lake Ngami getting shallower”. He must have realised, or it was common knowledge at the time, that the lake was a lot smaller in 1885 than when Livingstone had first visited it just forty years earlier. Today, the lake is a puddle compared to its size in 1849, when Livingstone recorded it as having an expanse of 270 square kilometres.
Rarely, and only after very good rains in the highlands of Angola, is the Boteti channel filled by a surging Okavango and, for a short period, it flows. Sometimes, along with heavy localised thunderstorms, it is enough to fill the entire Makgadikgadi in ankle-deep water. I have witnessed it. It was long before I began searching for Farini’s city and I saw, for a brief time, the pans turn into an enormous lake. The experience was the scene of my one and only epiphany. I had driven my vehicle onto a small muddy tongue of land that jutted into the pan. It was late in the afternoon just before sunset and the hot desert wind had stopped blowing. Without a hint of a breeze, the great expanse of water was mirror-smooth. I sat on the roof of my vehicle enjoying the solitude of nature. As the sun dipped low in the sky, it was perfectly reflected, eventually merging with its image to form an orange-red fireball that shrank then disappeared. That alone would have been an intensely magical moment but the experience was augmented by what was going on at the opposite end of the horizon. A full moon was rising over the shimmering water in the east, splitting in two as it rose above the horizon. I was witnessing four celestial blazing-red bodies all at once – two suns and two full moons. It was such an extraordinary sight that it provided the closest I’ve come to a transcendent experience. Farini thought perhaps his ruins could have been a temple. If the builders had had an experience like mine, they could well have been.
There is no outflow from the pans today but at one time there was. Schwarz calculated that they would have flowed south to southwest into the Molopo and Nossob rivers. He noticed the presence of several faint fossil river channels running north to south into the Nossob that pass in the general vicinity of where Farini located the ruins. As they do not form a continuous dry river course, these so-called rivers are difficult to track. They’re more like a vague string of pans that intermittently run northwards upstream, disappearing for a while and then reappearing before they vanish without further trace. The Herero, the tribe that has long inhabited the western fringes of the Kalahari, call these rivers omiramba – the ghost rivers.
Schwarz wanted to follow these courses upstream in order to prove that they linked either to the Makgadikgadi pans or Lake Ngami. If they did, he would have demonstrated that the presence of Farini’s ruins in the middle of the desert was plausible. Besides, Farini wrote the word ‘ruins’ on his Justus Perthes map alongside a charted river course and what appears to be a pan or small lake. Unfortunately, before Schwarz could test his theory and go in search of Farini’s ruins, he died while on a field expedition in Senegal. Coincidentally, his death on 19
