King Solomon and the Showman. Adam Cruise
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.
Chapter Four
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