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This book would not have been possible without the invaluable contributions from the league of extraordinary Lost City searchers who, over the course of a century, sometimes diligently, other times shambolically, tried in vain to locate what essentially is the Eldorado of Africa. In particular, John Clement and Fred Paver, who over their respective lifetimes meticulously collated every little bit of information on the subject and seemed to pluck clues out of nowhere. Their records are reproduced here in detail and they provided much needed direction for my own endeavours in the desert.

More so, it was the giants of African literature – writers of both fiction and non-fiction – that inspired my own desire, or rather obsession, to find the Kalahari’s Lost City. Alan Paton’s posthumously published Lost City of the Kalahari, an erudite travelogue of his own experience trying to unearth the mythical legend, was the ignition that sparked the great pyre of inflammable Lost City tinder piled up over my own lifetime. As a boy I lapped up Henry Rider Haggard’s African adventures of Allan Quatermain and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan. Later came Wilbur Smith’s fictional account of the Kalahari’s Lost City, The Sunbird, based upon real events and theories of the searchers themselves while the non-fictional accounts in Lawrence Green’s South African travel tales and Herman Charles Bosman’s short-story satire subliminally inspired my own dozen or so wide-eyed forays into the heart of the subcontinent.

Then, once my expeditions began in earnest, other writers aided my search. Fay Goldie’s anthology of anecdotes from diaries and interviews of a variety of seekers at the peak of Lost City mania in the 1950s and ’60s was indispensable to my investigations. I am especially indebted to the fastidious research by Canadian author Shane Peacock. He single-handedly unlocked the personality of the leading character of this story, the great but now largely forgotten nineteenth-century showman, G.A. Farini, whose own colourful yet believable account of his find in 1885 made it difficult for the more sceptical of Lost City seekers to refute the existence of an ancient city.

Literature was not the only medium that helped create this book. The Internet proved an excellent resource, especially posts by modern seekers of the city like Greg van Reis’s 2002 expedition with a convoy of four-wheel drives and microlight aircraft. At the other end of the time scale, I uncovered a series of wonderful sepia photographs on Flickr, the online image-hosting service. A member of Farini’s expedition – actually his foster son, Lulu – was an early and talented photographer. His set of photographs now belong to the National Archives of the United Kingdom. While I was unable to reproduce them in this book due to the cost and unfavourable exchange rate, the Flickr images provided visual verification of the landscape and area of Farini’s claim. (If you would like to see them, just search for “Lulu Farini AND Flickr” on Google.) Sketches of the original photographs, although highly stylised, were created for Farini’s French narrative of his adventure in Huit mois au Kalahari (Eight Months in the Kalahari). The most interesting are in this book, and come from a first edition in the Cape Town campus of the National Library of South Africa.

I would like to acknowledge the great contribution of the two Gills: firstly, Gill Moodie, the commissioning editor at Tafelberg, in the creation of this book. She gently goaded, prodded and persuaded me to include more colour and life in an already colourful and vibrant tale; and Gillian Warren-Brown, who, from her idyllic country home in the Eastern Cape, somehow tore her eyes away from the landscape to meticulously pick through my text to ensure the harmony of continuity and style.

Finally, the joy and excitement of my many adventures into the remote depths of the Kalahari were augmented by the steadfast presence of a fellow adventurer, whom I also happen to be married to. This book is dedicated to her.