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 January 1929 came two days after Farini himself passed away at the age of ninety-one.
Owing largely to Schwarz’s postulations there was, in South Africa at least, widespread interest in Farini’s ruins. It was no longer the colourful stuff of Haggard’s imagination. The press began submitting articles about the city’s possible location and origin. Against this backdrop, on New Year’s Eve of 1932 a schoolteacher named Jerry van Graan stumbled upon a real lost city, one that would set off Lost City mania in South Africa, and resurrect Farini from obscurity.
Almost as if one is reading from the pages of King Solomon’s Mines, Van Graan’s story begins with a mysterious legend told by his father, a pioneering farmer in the Limpopo River area. The tale involved a nineteenth-century hunter and explorer named François Bernard Lotrie. On his return from years of hunting in the unknown hinterland during the 1890s, Lotrie wore an intricate gold bangle of an unusual design. It was rumoured that he had found a cave in the side of a hill, which the local tribe believed was sacred. It was whispered that in the cave were dozens of decorated clay pots full of gold artefacts. Lotrie, of course, did not divulge its whereabouts. He took the information to his grave in 1917 but, fifteen years later, when Jerry van Graan was on a hunting trip near his father’s farm, he and his friends stopped to ask for water at the hut of a blind old tribesman named Mowena. When the water was presented in an elaborately decorated clay pot, Van Graan, remembering his father’s story about artefacts in clay pots, became curious. His interest was piqued even further when Mowena steadfastly refused to divulge the origins of the pot. Undeterred, Van Graan bribed Mowena’s son, who then led them to a hill the locals called Mapungubwe – ‘the place of wisdom’.
It was the find of the century, if one discounts Hiram Bingham’s rediscovery of Machu Picchu in 1911. The fantastic ruins of Mapungubwe have great walls of hand-fashioned rectangular blocks set in complex enclosures, similar to Farini’s ‘elliptical wall’ description. Van Graan and friends unearthed intricately worked gold artefacts, anklets and figurines, the most famous being that of a rhinoceros about thirteen centimetres in length. Most were found among the numerous burial sites surrounding the hill.
Being the desperate years of the Great Depression, Van Graan’s friends wanted to melt down the gold but he persuaded them not to. Instead, he contacted his former history professor at the University of Pretoria, who ensured that the discoverers were adequately compensated before