These days I am always losing my car keys and wander around like a lost soul until the redoubtable Thomas appears and finds them, firmly placing them were I can see them. Thomas is one of the gardeners here but has a heavy load on his shoulders. His brother was killed and it is Thomas’s responsibility to care for that family as well as his own so he does odd jobs after hours.
As a young student nurse I lost my glasses. I was nursing at Groote Schuur, the famous hospital in Cape Town where Chris Barnard pioneered the first heart transplant. In my ward was a veteran of the second world war his body still riddled with shrapnel that had to be removed piece by piece. He was an ardent Catholic and told me he would ask Saint Anthony to find the glasses and that I should pray to the saint too. Sure enough when I went down to Clifton beach in my off time the next day a kindly beach attendant produced them like a rabbit out of his pocket! Saint Anthony had heard my prayers!
I am always losing my way especially in Pretoria! Susan and children and I were on our way back from pastures far when we got lost there but were cheered up by little Ryan spotting a whole wall of advertising for Tassies, a red student wine that is a favourite of mine and can be found in the remotest corners of Southern Africa! It still amazes me how that and Coca Cola are delivered into the most out of the way places over the most appalling roads!
My family still laugh about the time when I had them driving round and round on our way to Mozambique looking for a guest house that I always stayed in but had forgotten that was on the way to Botswana!
One thing I do have though is a penchant for finding lost souls especially at Christmas time. One year at Mozambique I met Graham and his lady Cheryl at the bar in Turtle Cove. They were camping, family in far off places, knowing nobody. I invited them to join us for Christmas lunch. On Christmas morning Graham was the first on the beach to see the local fishermen take to the sea in their tiny rowing boats. They fish for marlin and sailfish and swordfish. For marlin they have another boat following them in case of capsizing. None of them can swim. This morning the catch was swordfish and Graham bought a kilo and surprised the rest of us with fresh shichimi for starters! I must say it took a lot of 2M beer to do the thing but it was divine! Graham and Cheryl are still friends albeit that they stay in the UK now.
Another Christmas also in Mozambique we asked a young woman who was teaching yoga at Nic and Nelia’s lovely yoga centre at Turtle Cove. Agni travelled the world teaching yoga and the marvelous dances she did with a hulahoop. She made me a small dream catcher that still hangs on my patio. Lets hope it is catching and holding a couple of dreams I still have!
It is not surprising then that when I came across the tale of the Lost City of the Kalahari while delving into the archives of the South African library in Cape Town that I was instantly captured by the story that begins in 1885 when G.A. Forini, a wealthy American, set up an expedition into the Kalahari as it was then called. Now its name is the Kgaligadi.
Farini took as his tracker an old man, Gert Louw, of Bushman extraction whose tales of ‘a hunter’s paradise’ lured Farini and amongst whose things Farini found diamonds.
Farini was not lured by the prospect of wealth; the spirit of adventure burned brightly within him. He also took his son ‘Lulu’ with him. Lulu was a portrait painter and photographer, a young man of courage. This was a time when photographers from all over the world were descending on the City of Gold, Johannesburg and Kimberly and the big hole.
After arriving in Cape Town they set off on the mail express bound for Kimberley. I think that must have been a Cape Cart. On the fifth day of their journey they were near Rietfontein accompanied by the Little People who knew the area well.
Farini was interested in sand and stone and all living things. He was not the type of person to falsify reports of things that he had seen. Their next camp was Tunobis on a plateau around 3,460 feet above sea level and nearly 10 feet higher that when Galtona was there so that Farini deduced that Lake Ngami was getting gradually shallower.
Another three days and they were at the Ki Ki mountains and then pushed on to the K’gung forest where they camped under large trees. They shot a giraffe and the next morning lions were feeding on the kill when Lulu arrived in the wagon.
Lulu left the wagon and ran through the grass with his camera on his back to take a shot of the lions feeding. He calmly focused the camera and took the shot then Farini and Lulu and his companion opened fire on the lions.
The lions charged in the direction the bullets were coming from and Lulu dropped his gun, got back under the black cloth of his camera and focused on the charging lions! He took one picture and, when a big male charged the camera he charged the lion with his tripod. This proved too much for the lion and the animal retreated!
Their supplies were dwindling and Farini resolved to go to Upington to replenish them. Travelling south they camped near Ki Ki mountain beside a long line of stone that looked like the wall of China after an earthquake but which proved to be the ruins of quite an extensive structure, in some places buried beneath the sand, but in others in full view.
They traced the remains for nearly a mile. The general outline was in the form of an arc, inside of which lay at intervals of about forty feet apart, a series of heaps of masonry in the shape of an oval or an obtuse ellipse, about a foot and a half deep, with a flat bottom, but hollowed out at the sides for about one foot from the edge.
Farini got his men to excavate with shovels and the joints of the stones were perfect. He thought this must have been a city or a place of worship. The following day they continued with the excavations and came upon a pavement about twenty feet long intersected with another to make a Maltese cross in the centre of which must have stood an altar.
When he returned Farini wrote the book ‘Lost City of the Kalahari’ that contained a map of his journey but the many others that followed could find no trace of the lost city and he was discredited.
As late as 1959 a Dr. Haldeman regularly took his family on an expedition during the July school holidays having read Farini’s accounts, looking for the lost city. “We went to places nobody had been before, shooting game for the pot. My son Scott, 16 shot his first buck, Lynne 14, helped her mother with the camp cooking, May and Kaye 11 years had to do the washing up while Lee, 4 was the camp mascot.
On one trip they wanted to reach Khakami, and Mapare, the chief of all the Mkalaharis recognized his father’s picture in Farini’s book. He agreed to go with them. They eventually came to Bohelo Batu meaning ‘the people who died’. Those that had reached the pan to find it dry had died.
On their journey they passed Manung pan and later Lekubu a few miles from Khakami pan. This country fitted Farini’s description of the location of the Lost City but they did not find it.
At Khanzi they showed the picture of the Lost City and asked if anyone had seen it but the answer was no. That night there were two leopard in their camp and they heard that a leopard had come into a hut in Kang and killed two children and that a boy, sleeping by the fire had been killed by a lion.
They planned their next expedition with Martinus Drotsky who discovered the Drostky Caves along the Western delta of Botswana to be their companion. Charlie Swart had reported seeing a fabulous ruin of white stones in 1905. A half mile long wall with pillar posts at a single entrance, enclosed a half moon circle of buildings and graves. He rode out from a border beacon for about sixteen miles to see it but the beacons were now non-existent.
There were many stories about this and Martinus Drotsky had heard that there were seven Bushmen tribes with seven ancient villages in the form of a star with a big secret and sacred place in the middle of them, which could be the Lost City.
Martinus was 73 at the time and in his youth he could run down a steenbok (small agile antelope) within thirty miles and kill it by hand. He could crawl down a porcupine hole and kill it just as the bushmen did. He would crawl in naked with a four foot pointed stick, then make a mound of sand between him and the porcupine to prevent the porcupine making a pincushion out of him. He would then kill the porcupine with the stick and pull it out and have food for a week!
He is rumoured to have once ran 125 miles through the sand and brush in twenty five hours without taking food or water!
In the area of this search they were visited every night by friendly Bushmen who told them that all the Bushmen knew where the ruins were but were too afraid to tell them. One said “The stones were cemented together with better cement than we have today.” One man took them to his father, who had seen the ruins, but the old man also refused to tell. Their search took them on through the Aha mountains past Kai Kai to the Drotsky caves.
The Haldemans returned again and again as did others too, to no avail. Lawrence Green in To the River’s Edge quotes a letter he received in 1936 from Mr. Paver saying “When you see the country you realize that one can spend months searching the sand dunes without covering a fraction of the area in which the Lost City may be situated.”
Lawrence met Dr. Borcherds in Upington who told him that he had recently met farmers who had been poaching game in Botswana and found the Lost City and their description tallied exactly with Farini’s in his book.
Dr. Borcherds told them that a policeman patrolling on a camel had come across an ancient stone quarry in the desert. Deep in the sand the sergeant discovered the remains of what looked like a boat some fourteen foot in length. This did not surprise Dr. Borcherds as it was believed that the rivers once came south from Lake Ngami to join the Orange River.
No doubt the dunes will one day give up their secret to a modern day adventurer. My friend Tiaan Theron rang me one day very excited that Lake Ngami was flowing south and we set off for a picnic immediately. Hundreds of water birds were wading in the shallows as the water came pouring onto the pan. It is a long while ago and I don’t know if since the waters have once more retreated. I do know that the Savuti Channel that was dry for many years suddenly had water one year with no explanation, this is possibly due to the plate deep beneath the Botswana earth that shifts every now and then altering the landscape above.
The area in question runs along the border of Namibia northwards to the Western Delta and the distances involved are vast so who knows, one day the red desert sands may shift again to reveal the mystery that has captured our imaginations for so long.
Molly's Musings On Life And Travel 