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Ancient Mariners

During that first foray into the vast, waterless Kalahari landscape, something began to niggle me about Farini’s find. Why would a city suddenly sprout up in the middle of a desert? It would have been impossible to effectively build one in such an arid environment. Perhaps, like the villagers at Lehututu had done, the ancients sank deep wells in the pans or dry riverbeds. But these would not have been enough to support a trading town of even a moderate size and, in any case, where and with whom could these desert-dwellers have traded?

Farini wrote in the introduction to Through the Kalahari that the promise of diamonds had prompted him to undertake the expedition. He was inspired by what sounds like a King Solomon’s Mines tale related to him by a Baster interpreter named ‘Kert’ (Gert) Louw, who was touring the United States with a freak-show troupe of San-speaking ‘pygmies’ – of which more later. Louw, a native of the Mier region, said he knew of a place in the Kalahari where there were many diamonds. He claimed to have found one weighing 188 carats. At first, Farini did not believe him, but when he rifled through Louw’s belongings and found several stones he immediately made up his mind. Within a couple of weeks he and Lulu were sailing for Africa, with Louw in tow.

Diamonds may have been one reason for an ancient trading civilisation to set up shop in the Kalahari. But diamonds don’t quench thirsts. How a city could have developed without water was a mystery. I was not the only one confounded. Almost all the previous searchers contemplated this problem with varying degrees of gravity. Out of this an interesting theory developed, shared by intellectuals and those prone to bouts of whimsy. It contained all the elements of an intriguing plot for a work of fiction, and Wilbur Smith used it to great effect in The Sunbird.

The first person to take an earnest interest in Farini’s ruins was a British-born professor of geology at Rhodes University in South Africa, Ernest Hubert Lewis Schwarz. He was a veteran of Kalahari exploration and, like Farini, firmly believed the Kalahari could be ‘reclaimed’ for commercial agriculture. The professor, however, took his scheme much further. In an effort to stimulate commercial agriculture, Schwarz thought it possible to divert the Okavango, Cunene and Zambezi rivers south through the Kalahari and all the way into the Orange River system. Schwarz believed that these great rivers in south-central Africa had flowed perennially north to south through the Kalahari, after which they joined the Nossob-Molopo-Kuruman river system. He called this ancient super-river the Hygap, after the name for the lower Molopo printed on Farini’s Justus Perthes map.

Based on this theory, it was conceivable that ancient maritime nations had navigated up the mighty river system, starting at the mouth of the Orange, all the way into the heart of the Kalahari. After reading Farini’s description of the ruins, Schwarz hypothesised that, given the cyclopean character of the ruins, particularly a fluted column, the Lost City could have been a riverside trading post. On a grander scale, perhaps even the bustling port of a Mediterranean civilisation facilitating the flow of diamonds and other goods down the Hygap-Orange river system, then up the African coastline through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean. Farini’s mention of the Hercules Falls added to Schwarz’s picture.

Unlikely as it sounds, this theory was not implausible. The Orange River may not be navigable today but at one time it was. If, as Schwarz believed, the Okavango, Cunene and Zambezi at one time flowed into the Orange, then the river would have been much wider than it is today. Indeed, there is geological evidence that the flow of the Orange was much stronger in bygone days. My previous visit to Augrabies Falls had shown that the present-day chute was carved by a volume of water far greater than the Orange River’s present flow. This story is not unique to the Orange.

The Molopo River meets the Orange downstream from the falls, and it was there that I made a breathtaking discovery while working with a group of Americans. They had organised a Lidar plane so we could create a high-resolution map of the landscape from the air. Lidar (light detection and ranging) technology uses a pulsing laser light to measure distances to the Earth, essentially surveying the ground surface to help pinpoint features that are otherwise difficult to detect. I had wanted to check out Schwarz’s theory and see if the perennially dry Molopo could, in the ancient past, have been a river with a permanent and significant flow of water. Once we were airborne it quickly became apparent that Lidar was not required. The naked eye did just fine. What I discovered is that for a river that hardly gets more than a trickle of water each century, it boasts an impressively deep gorge that must be about a hundred metres deep in places. It has huge sunbaked granite walls smoothed by what could only have been a powerful cascade of water. It reminded me of the deep, burnished granite gorges just below the Augrabies.

The terrain was even more impressive from the ground. When we hiked into the gorge it felt as if we were in an ancient landscape that was once well watered. We even discovered some ruins. It was nothing much, just a couple of tumbledown walls in what appeared to be a small settlement, with some rudimentary graves. But, as the presenter and I discussed on camera, they did not match Farini’s description. Certainly there were no fluted columns or Maltese Cross-patterned pavements. The structures, though, would definitely have been there in 1885. Farini would have passed through this gorge on his way to the Augrabies Falls so it’s likely he saw them too.

It was obvious to us that, at one time, the Molopo had either been prone to flash floods or it had enjoyed a mighty, permanent flow. Schwarz may have been right; the entire Zambezi, Okavango and Cunene river system could easily have flowed all the way down here, culminating in this canyon before joining the Orange River.

It’s not only the geological evidence that supports Schwarz’s theory. It is common knowledge among historians that the Phoenicians were great ocean explorers. They were the first navigators to venture beyond the Pillars of Hercules – the promontories flanking the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar – an amazing feat at the time. Even today, navigating through the Strait under sail is a challenge. Billions of litres of water from the Atlantic funnel through the narrow passage between Europe and Africa, creating a ripping current. This, combined with a contrary tide, is downright hazardous to modern yachts, let alone sailing vessels from antiquity. After passing through the strait, the Phoenicians navigated as far as the British Isles and Ireland, where they traded for tin. We know too that they traded for gold along the West African coast at least as far as Cameroon. Moreover, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, a Phoenician expedition 2,500 years ago, funded by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II, set sail from the Red Sea and inched its way down the east coast of Africa. After three years it returned to Egypt, but disembarked on the Mediterranean side. The intrepid explorers had circumnavigated the continent. Thus, the coasts of Africa, on both sides, were known to these great ocean navigators, and it is quite feasible that they could have sailed up a navigable river.

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 getting the national government to purchase the area for the university. Paver, who at that time was the assistant editor of The Star, Johannesburg’s main daily, personally covered the story. It is likely that it was Mapungubwe that got Paver all fired up about lost cities, sending him on a lifelong quest to find Farini’s ruins.

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’.