King Solomon and the Showman. Adam Cruise

      Modern experts reckon that Mapungubwe had a population of about 5,000 inhabitants and was the centre of a prodigious kingdom that stretched from the south of the Limpopo to the north of the Zambezi, and east all the way to the Indian Ocean in present-day Mozambique, where they traded in ivory and gold with sailors from the Levant. Some of their distinctively sculpted gold artefacts made it as far as India and China. Today Mapungubwe is a World Heritage Site.

      Coinciding with the discovery of Mapungubwe, a profusion of San and Bantu folklore about mysterious ancient cities built by the ‘strange ones’ or ‘old people’ suddenly surfaced. Most of these stories were recorded by one of the most prolific Lost City searchers – a politically connected professor of medicine at Stellenbosch University named ‘Francie’ Daniel du Toit van Zijl. The stories he collected in the 1950s alluded to a chain of ancient forts, built by past civilisations, spanning the subcontinent from east to west. These forts included Mapungubwe and the famous ruins of Great Zimbabwe, and were allegedly designed to secure the safe transport of gold and silver to ports on either coast. Farini’s Lost City could have been such a fort, and there were probably others, as yet undiscovered.

      Ibbetson, Paton’s Lost City nemesis, was one who fervently believed Farini’s ruin was an outpost of a succession of grand forts. Characteristically, he fancifully hypothesised that the civilisation responsible for building Farini’s city had eventually left from the west coast of Africa on rafts, making it all the way across the Atlantic to South America – there establishing the Inca and Aztec civilisations. At the time of their departure into the Kalahari, Ibbetson boasted about mounting a follow-up Kontiki-like expedition to prove his hypothesis. He never did. Nor did he find Farini’s Lost City in the Kalahari.

      Speculations even emanated from the academic sphere. Pre-eminent French geographer, writer and explorer François Balsan was among those who made unfounded assertions. He was the leader of the 1951 Panhard-Capricorn expedition, which was (and probably still is) the most scientific and systematic of the Lost City searches ever conducted. His folly concerned a rock painting known as the ‘White Lady’, which is found under an overhang of the Brandberg mountain in the Namib Desert. The painting, reputed to be about two thousand years old, allegedly depicts a white lady in ornamental dress. Balsan posited that the White Lady was “a portrait painted in very ancient times, perhaps of an Egyptian woman, if these Mediterranean colonists a thousand or two thousand years before Christ had branches in Austral Africa.” The rock painting has drawn attention from scholars ever since it was ‘discovered’ in 1918. Amid thousands of other ochre-coloured depictions in the region, the White Lady stands out because she is much larger, more detailed, painted all in white and appears to be wearing ornamental attire similar to that of an Egyptian pharaoh. Not much was made of this observation until 1929 when a copy of the image landed on the desk of French anthropologist Henri Breuil. The Frenchman noted a similarity between the White Lady and ancient images found in Crete. He concluded that both were Phoenician in origin. The theory has since been thoroughly discredited by researchers who pointed out, for instance, that the White Lady has a penis and is therefore male, that he does not have a Mediterranean profile, and that he is holding a typically San – not Mediterranean – bow and arrows.

      The ancient seafaring civilisation connection was even founded on hearsay. In 1947, as part of his research for To the River’s End, Green interviewed Borcherds, the veteran Lost City searcher from Upington. The old man, then in his eighties, was still “keenly interested as ever in the ruins”. Borcherds told Green an intriguing story. A police sergeant had once told him that, many years before, while patrolling the ‘lost city area’ mounted on a camel he had come across “an ancient stone quarry” with squared blocks that matched Farini’s description. The officer added this fascinating rider: he unearthed “the remains of what appeared to be a boat, fourteen feet in length”. Borcherds was also convinced that a city had developed on a flowing riverbank and that an advanced race of people, whoever they were, had had access to river transport. The boat, he told Green, was final and conclusive evidence that an ancient city existed. “It is only a matter of time,” he reckoned, “before the dunes give up their secret.” Borcherds died a year later.

      It wasn’t the only ‘discovery’ of maritime evidence in the dunes of that part of the Kalahari. A large expedition in 2002, sponsored by a variety of companies including Mitsubishi, Kodak and Garmin, conducted a thorough ground and air search for Farini’s Lost City. Using microlight aircraft, the team concentrated its search, as I had on my first expedition, on the area around Farini’s coordinates. Using a twenty-by-twenty-kilometre search grid, the various search parties picked their way in 4x4s through the dense shrubs. Their aim was to locate strings of pans that once made up rivers, since they too surmised that Farini’s ancient city was a port and therefore had to be close to water. They had more luck than I did. The team discovered some Stone Age tools, a neatly planted orchard, and a fish trap!

      But the team did not find the city there. Expedition leader Greg van der Reis, however, remained undeterred: “If traders were sailing the oceans 4,000 years ago,” he mused, “and the archeological finds point to the Egyptians mining gold and diamonds in Africa at the times of the pharaohs, is it not possible that a city such as the one described by Farini could have been built in the diamond-rich Kalahari?”

      Wilbur Smith dedicated an entire novel to this sort of conjecture. The Sunbird, written in 1972, was one of Smith’s favourites. He confessed that King Solomon’s Mines had heavily influenced the plot but the narrative of The Sunbird is closer to a combination of Farini and Schwarz. The story centres round the discovery, from hazy aerial surveying photographs, of an outline of a ruined city in the Kalahari. A ground team of archaeologists is sent to investigate, and they realise from the cyclopean nature of the masonry that they are the remains of a disconnected Phoenician civilisation – the last remnants of Carthage – that once flourished in the Kalahari before it vanished. Like Farini, the archaeologists present their findings to a panel of the Royal Geographical Society and explain that a Phoenician leader, fleeing from the yoke of Rome after the Third Punic War in 176 BC with 9,000 supporters, sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and down the west coast of Africa “probably establishing trading stations on the Gold, Ivory and Nigerian coasts…” Then, following Schwarz’s hypothesis about the original drainage system of the Kalahari, Smith writes that two years after setting out, the Carthaginian refugees reached the mouth of a placid river, possibly the Orange, and sailed up it for sixteen days “dragging their ships bodily through the shallows until finally they reached a mighty lake”. There they found “an unpopulated vacuum” and diamonds in the gravel on the edge of the lake (in reality there’s a flourishing diamond mine called Orapa on the shores of the Makgadikgadi), with vast herds of elephant. They sent metallurgists east into the highlands of Manica Province in present-day Zimbabwe, where they discovered great seams of gold-bearing rock. They built a city on the banks of the lake, calling it Opet, and a nearby tribe “of gentle yellow people” welcomed them. However, over the decades the city-state begins to degenerate. It becomes lawless and seditious before mysteriously disappearing without a trace.

      Smith’s fiction is based on Schwarz’s fact. At least this is what I excitedly came to believe. I began to plan my second Lost City adventure. This time the aim was to complete what Schwarz had set out to discover: to find those fossil streams that once flowed from the north into the Nossob River. I believed Farini’s Phoenician port city would be found on the banks of such a ‘river’.