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 too impulsive. Kalahari travel is not for the faint-hearted. We had been several times before, but they had been trifling little excursions compared with what we were about to do. Those previous trips had been holiday jaunts, sometimes to the tourist-laden South African side of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, another 300 kilometres to the north. That sector of the park spoilt us with its amenities and comforts. Amanda and I had also been far to the north of the Kalahari, to the palm-lined Okavango Delta and Chobe River. Once, before I met Amanda, I spent a couple of nights at the huge Makgadikgadi Salt Pans right in the centre of the Kalahari. That was my sum total. Now things would be different. There would be no rest camp with running water and ablutions, no fences to protect us from the wildlife and, according to the road map, there appeared to be nothing at Farini’s coordinates – not even a track, let alone a road. This was going to be a serious expedition.
My vehicle was powerful and designed for hard labour, not comfort. It was the kind of thing built with the transportation of livestock in mind – a genuine farm workhorse with a tiny single cab for a driver and one passenger. There was no air conditioning or radio. It had a bench seat that didn’t recline and the suspension was so primitive you almost needed to wear a back-brace to prevent putting your spine out when jolting over uneven terrain. Fixed permanently on its roof was a fold-out two-person tent, which, as we had discovered from previous outdoor experiences, wasn’t very comfortable. The tent was claustrophobic, and if the vehicle