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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 wasn’t precisely on level ground, you could find yourself squashed by your sleeping partner, or vice versa. Thankfully, Amanda is quite petite. The vehicle’s only advantage was a spacious bak behind the cabin with a canopy that would carry almost anything from jerrycans to camping tables. When travelling on dirt roads, the vehicle had a penchant for funnelling half the dust kicked up by the tyres into the canopy so that, when we arrived at Augrabies, everything – our bags, bundles and boxes – was covered in fine sand.

During our stopover at Augrabies, while Amanda rather pointlessly set about dusting everything down, I organised our supply of water. When you enter the deep Kalahari alone, as we were doing, water becomes the most essential thing in your vehicle. We were going to need a lot. I collected more than 100 litres, using four 25-litre and two 15-litre plastic containers – enough, I hoped, for drinking, cooking, and washing. The last would be reduced to a cupful a day. Satiating our thirst obviously took precedence over hygiene, but by the end of the trip the inside of the cab smelled like the lair of an old hyena.

We did arrange for some comforts. Almost as important as water was the supply of wine. Life without wine, even for a couple of weeks, is not worth living – even in the depths of the Kalahari. Amanda and I are unashamed wine snobs and won’t hesitate to open an expensive bottle of Burgundy on a whim. However, bottles of expensive elixir in a hot, bouncy, off-road vehicle were impractical. We had to make do with five-litre boxes of cheap wine, ten of them to be exact, that I bought from a co-op along the Orange River, an area famous for producing gallons of cheap wine. Amanda and I settled on the mantra that bad wine is better than no wine. Surprisingly, the bulk wine of the Orange River was pleasantly quaffable, and took up minimal space, especially when the papsaks were removed from their boxes. We did take one glass bottle though – a local Orange River brandy, kept for ‘emergency’ purposes.

Diesel came next on the priority list. My vehicle had a whopping 180-litre fuel tank, but the big engine, combined with the deep sand, would guzzle fuel faster than the two of us took in wine, so for extra precaution we carried another eighty litres of fuel in jerrycans. In total we were carrying almost half a ton in liquid alone. This was on top of the weight of two spare tyres, a tent, camping table, sleeping cots, gas bottles, cameras, notebooks and food.

The following day we nosed the heavy vehicle northwards, roughly following the course of the Molopo River until we crossed over into Botswana, passing the forlorn dusty village of Tsabong. We were now in the real Kalahari. The road became a channel of deep red sand, making progress agonisingly slow. There was nothing graceful about our progress. The truck strained through the fine powder; the road rutted by previous vehicles passing on their way to and from the remote Kgalagadi villages. The rear end bounced to and fro like the buttocks of a grossly overweight belly dancer. We were limited to a crawl of less than twenty kilometres an hour.

The deep Kalahari sand tests both driver and machine. I had dropped the tyre pressure so they were almost flat when we left Tsabong. Lower tyre pressure meant an increased surface area making contact with the sand. It prevented the tyres from ‘digging’, which might get us stuck. Momentum is the key; the vehicle must move over the sand with a constant speed while the gear changes. Inconsistent accelerator action or incorrect gear selection will also get you stuck. I had no intention of wasting precious time digging out a bogged-down vehicle in 40ºC temperatures, so I focused on nothing but driving, while Amanda clung doggedly to her seat. We had no time to appreciate the scenery until we came, with some relief, to Lehututu.

As we approached the villages there was a notable change in the vegetation. The soft yellow grass, so prevalent since we left Tsabong, was gone. Only red sand interspersed with stunted thorn trees remained. The reason, we soon discovered, was cattle. In his presentation to the Royal Geographical Society, Farini was correct in his assessment about the Kalahari being ranch country – although with the beasts having trampled and eaten every blade of grass and camelthorn pod, I had to wonder how they still survived. Did the herdsmen have to feed them on grass trucked in from elsewhere, or were these cattle given to browsing the thorny acacia bushes? How the people sustained cattle herds out here was beyond me, but the baKgalagadi seem to be able to do it. The cattle were healthy and abundant.

After the villages, the road became a set of parallel tracks. The grass grew tall and thick on either side, and between the tracks too. This middle section of grass was a problem. As you drive over it, the fine seeds disperse in clouds. If not prevented from getting into the radiator, they clog it, causing it to overheat and, before you know it, the engine seizes. I covered the entire front and underneath of the vehicle grille with ground sheeting, used as makeshift gauze to create an industrial-strength mosquito net. But that wasn’t the only concern with the seeds. They collected under the chassis and around the hot exhaust, forming a thick film of what basically acted as dry tinder, making our truck one big rolling fire hazard. We constantly had to stop and check underneath. Just in case, I carried a fire extinguisher under the seat. Many Kalahari off-roaders have had their journey unceremoniously and permanently halted when their vehicles spontaneously combusted in the desert. We came across a number of charred remains along the way. It would be a common sight with almost all subsequent expeditions we would undertake. When burnt, the aluminium bodies of Land Rovers simply melt away into the sand like water, leaving only a steel chassis.

Closing in on the coordinates, the tracks passed a series of bright white pans before we were forced to turn away from them, onto rough terrain. It was tough going. Sharp dead branches that could cause a puncture at any moment cracked and snapped under the tyres. Holes dug by a menagerie of burrowing animals were another obstacle. Perched on the edge of her seat and craning her neck, Amanda instructed me to swing left or right. If we were to get stuck in a deep burrow, there would be no way of getting out alive, as there was not a single human being within a fifty-kilometre radius to help us. Less dangerous but creating endless annoyance, was a shrub common in these parts called a three-thorn. As its name suggests, the dense cluster of branches taper into a trident of three long thorns and it’s impossible to avoid them. The hard thorns scrape with a jarring shriek down the paintwork of the vehicle, like fingernails running over a blackboard. They leave behind a roadmap of criss-crossing fine lines all over the truck.

Finally, when exhaustion, irritation and the heat were becoming unbearable, we arrived at the coordinates. Unsurprisingly, there weren’t any ruins. There was just the endless red sand, clusters of acacia trees and three-thorn bushes, and the sea of tall yellow grass blowing gently in the hot late-afternoon breeze. In Farini’s own words this was a lone and desolate spot. He was right, but this wasn’t the spot. It was clear his coordinates weren’t precise. Yet they needed to be pinpoint-accurate because, even if Farini were out by half a degree, finding the ruins in this landscape would be like looking for a needle in a prairie-ful of haystacks. At that moment I was struck by the words recorded by consummate travel writer and author of non-fiction Africana Lawrence Green, who was also a Lost City enthusiast. Before he embarked on his expedition in 1936, another searcher by the name of Frederick Paver, who had gone before, warned him: “When you see the country, you realise that one could spend months searching the sand dunes without covering a fraction of the area in which the lost city may be situated.” Paver was dead right. Standing on the roof of our truck surveying the endless empty landscape, it was no mystery to us why these ruins had yet to be found.

At dusk we set up camp, lit a crackling fire and enjoyed a glass of wine. It would become the most familiar pattern of every one of our Kalahari travels. Spurfowl clucked around our tent like domestic chickens, and the ambient sound of a hundred toktokkie beetles tapping their armoured abdomens on the ground – tok-tok-tok – added to the orchestra of crickets. A hyena cackled in the distance, and a nightjar followed his lead with a quavering call. This empty desert was pure bliss, and even though our mission might be a complete failure, we were content. The pattern would repeat itself night after night, expedition after expedition.

We spent the rest of the days roaming about the area, just to make sure, but we knew we were wasting our time. We followed the full length of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park’s northern boundary and the entire area of the game park of Mabuasehube. For some strange geographical reason, Mabuasehube is elevated slightly from the surrounding desert. The rectangular shape of parkland seems incongruous with the rest of the Transfrontier Park. Originally it was a park in its own right and was officially incorporated into the Transfrontier Park only in the year 2000, though no fences have ever divided the two wilderness areas. Mabua is renowned for its series of circular pans, some the size of cricket fields, others several kilometres in diameter. It has a number of A-frame campsites with pit-latrines and a place to hang a shower. We were fortunate to get one at the edge of a pan after which the park is named. Mabuasehube Pan is about two kilometres in diameter and is the only one that is red. The others are either chalky white or covered in grass and all look like lunar craters when viewed from above. This red pan does not have a blade of grass on it – it’s completely barren. There were vultures hanging about though, like grim reapers waiting for something to die. I decided to nickname this red pan Dead Pan.

On the western rim of the pan are some limestone outcrops. This was the first time we had come across anything other than fine sand. If the ancients needed to build a city, they would have needed hard material to hew building blocks from. This pan provided evidence of such material. The rocky outcrop gave me a glimmer of hope that the city was still out here somewhere.

During this trip, when not heaving through the sand in the truck, I could usually be found swinging from a hammock, most often in the deep shade of a camelthorn tree. I was rereading the colourful accounts Farini and Paton had written about their journeys, and comparing theirs with mine. Farini’s buckwagon was the Victorian version of my solid expedition vehicle. It had smaller wheels in the front than at the back and was “of strong build and the wood well-seasoned”. He had a team of fifty oxen that hauled two wagons but not all the oxen were inspanned at the same time. They were rotated in order to rest them from the grinding work. Leather sheaths were fitted to the wheels of the wagons to make them wider and therefore easier to pull over the sand. Farini, of course, wasn’t able to carry drums of water as we could – at least not enough to ensure the survival of his entire entourage for a few months in the desert, including his fifty oxen, four horses and a pack of hunting dogs. It would simply be too heavy for the draught animals to haul through the sand. The entire party, both man and beast, had to rely on tsamma, the life-blood of the Kalahari. The tsamma is a species of watermelon. We saw many growing in patches alongside the tracks. They look like watermelons, but they are more spherical and slightly smaller and are found in a number of varieties throughout the desert regions of Africa. They are the ancestors of the watermelons found in modern grocery stores and supermarkets. The Ancient Egyptians cross-pollinated the wild varietal with the sweet fleshy pink watermelon most of us know. The flesh of the tsamma is much harder, whiter and very bitter – I don’t like it. Farini found they tasted best when roasted before being squeezed. Then, by adding a little suet and milk, it “makes quite a refreshing beverage…[and] quenches the thirst better than water”.

During the summer months when thunderstorms are prevalent, tsamma melons tend to grow in large patches and are fairly widespread. Farini’s train of oxen would therefore move exclusively according to their location. It wasn’t all plain sailing though. At times the patches were hard to come by, either because the thunderstorms had not been good in that area or the desert ungulates, the springbok, gemsbok and wildebeest, had got to them first. Farini lost a good number of his beasts, as well as his prize horse, to thirst. On one occasion, when he was separated from his caravan and got lost, he too almost succumbed. He was found in the nick of time, unconscious but alive.

While we have the luxury of carrying gallons of water with us, the food and how we cook it are almost unchanged since Farini’s day. It occurred to me one evening when cooking over the open fire that I owned a piece of equipment common to all African explorations before, during and since Farini’s 1885 journey. It is the black three-legged cast-iron cooking pot called a potjie – little pot – an invaluable and timeless piece of exploration equipment. The design is simple but supremely effective as the object can withstand decades of being placed in fires daily without ever needing to be replaced or repaired. Furthermore, the tripod design of the legs means that the pot remains upright among flaming logs and coals throughout the duration of cooking, and you don’t have to worry that it may tip over and tumble all its contents into the fire. Three legs are more stable than four; ask any wildlife or landscape photographer who has to balance and set hi-tech equipment over uneven ground. Paton’s expedition had a potjie, which they used to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner, as did Farini. His servants would boil an entire steenbok slowly in the pot until the flesh became tender and separated from the bone. Like the desert ungulates, Amanda and I are plant-eaters. We would enjoy rice and a medley of vegetables, herbs and spices thrown haphazardly into the potjie and cooked slowly to make a hodgepodge of swirling flavours and textures. When travelling, the soot-blackened pot is wedged firmly in the rim of my spare wheel on the roof. Farini’s was hitched to the back of the wagon on a hook.

Farini’s wagon, like my vehicle, had a side awning that could be rolled out for shade, and it carried everything from guns, ammunition (15,000 rounds, no less), tools, a spade, an axe, some rope, a first-aid kit and lanterns to concertinas, mouth-organs, eau de cologne, and a small cask of South African brandy – a roughly distilled potion called Cape Smoke. For someone who had never been to Africa before, nor tried his hand at exploration, Farini was certainly well prepared for a comfortable life in the desert.

Farini was much better equipped than Paton’s 1956 expedition. A comparison between the inventories of their supplies highlights the difference. Farini’s is extensive, like the stock-take of a general trading store. Paton’s team only listed ten items, which also included arms and ammunition. Their journey was perhaps the worst-prepared of all Lost City expeditions. Not that it was Paton’s fault. Sailor Ibbetson was the man in charge and he turned out to be a royal swindler. After promises of a sponsorship for a brand-new seven-ton truck by Leyland Motor Corporation, Ibbetson instead procured a battered, coarsely painted, psychedelic Austin jalopy, which the party nicknamed Kalahari Polka. Poor Paton ended up paying for the vehicle out of his own pocket and was tricked into forking out for most of the expedition’s other expenses too.

The Kalahari Polka was a terrible machine that overheated and broke down repeatedly but somehow managed to traverse almost 4,800 kilometres over the most treacherous sandy tracks. It was a true Kalahari adventure where the members endured endless hardships – shooting game for the pot and surviving tough all-night travelling conditions (the day was too hot for the engine to run), picking their way slowly through endless dunes and thornveld in the back of the open lorry. In Paton’s words, the journey was “purgatory… thorn branches would excoriate the canopy from end to end, and it sounded like great waves passing alongside and over a struggling ship. At times the gearbox screamed. The desert poured in, through the holes in the ancient sail, thorns of camelthorn and red thorns and mutsiara, worms and beetles, and stinging wasps, and praying mantises of all sizes and colours, sand and dust and seeds from the everlasting grass. These seeds choked the radiator and caused it to boil incessantly, so that we had to protect it with a sheet of fine metal gauze.”

Other explorers in motor vehicles recorded great difficulty getting through the endless dunes. Green, who travelled in the 1930s, said they struggled to make forty kilometres in a day, and a team thirty years later fared no better, recording that on good days they travelled forty-three kilometres a day in a Jeep. Surprisingly, in his paper to the Royal Geographical Society, Farini claimed that he had covered roughly the same daily distance: “On average we covered from twenty to twenty-five miles a day, and when the sand was firmer than usual, increased our speed in proportion.” (Elsewhere he claims to have covered a daily average of twenty-five to thirty miles.)

This last bit of information concerning Farini’s daily mileage was a light-bulb moment. Instead of dashing naively into the desert trying to search aimlessly around some general coordinates, it struck me that I ought to have studied Farini’s text a little more closely – landmarks, travelling times per day and other observations would provide much better clues about the location of the Lost City. Also, Green’s reference to this Paver guy, who seemed to know something about the desert, made me realise that I needed to study the expedition results of the other, more thorough searchers for Farini’s ruins. Paton and co. did not cut the mustard in that department, but Paver seemed to be the right sort of chap to investigate further.

Way back in 1933, Frederick Righton Paver, with his friend Dr Meent Borcherds, had assiduously planned to get to the bottom of Farini’s mystery. Paver was a newspaper reporter and amateur archaeologist who became obsessed with Farini’s ruins. He spent the best part of his life collecting a wealth of information about the Lost City; information I was itching to get my hands on.

Borcherds was a long-time resident of Upington, the principal town on the banks of the Orange River, and a town that Farini had passed through on his way back from the Kalahari. By the 1930s Borcherds had also collected a wealth of anecdotal evidence proving, in his mind, that the ruins were real. But unlike me, Paver and Borcherds had carefully studied Farini’s map and found it woefully inaccurate. In his paper to the Royal Geographical Society – which the chairman read out because its author was unable to attend – Farini admitted that he had not managed to obtain a decent map in London before embarking on his journey. Only when he returned from the Kalahari did he buy one in Berlin, compiled by Justus Perthes of Gotha. Farini then sketched his route on the map, as best he could remember, and presented it alongside his paper. For the British presentation, W & AK Johnston of Edinburgh supplied the map, but it was essentially the same chart.

Paver noted, however, that the grid lines for plotting coordinates were not accurate on either of these maps, which meant that Farini’s estimated fixes were automatically sixty to a hundred kilometres out. There were other errors too. For example, the confluence of the Nossob and Auob (printed as Oup) was incorrectly placed after the confluence with the Molopo River, when in fact the two rivers meet well before they reach the Molopo at Twee Rivieren, about five kilometres before the current entrance to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park.

Paton said Farini did not have a sextant. It wasn’t listed on his detailed inventory that included even minor items such as buttons, bolts and the number of spoons and bullets. However, Farini does mention in his paper to the Royal Geographical Society that Fritz Landwehr, the German trader accompanying them, was “of great assistance in using the sextant and fixing our daily position”. We don’t know how accurate Landwehr was in plotting a daily fix or whether Farini faithfully copied the information on his map, but even if they were meticulous, owing to the flaws in the maps of the day their data was always going to be inaccurate. Essentially, when laying out maps in the 1880s, the cartographers were guessing. They were genuinely dealing with terra incognita.

Farini even acknowledged this in his book when he reproduced this little rhyming stanza by Jonathan Swift:

Geographers on Africa’s maps

With savage pictures fill their gaps;

And o’er uninhabitable downs

Place elephants for want of towns.

Farini’s map was therefore of little help, so we went back home and I returned to the drawing board.