For more than a hundred years, a mysterious story about a mysterious city, lost in the center of the most sultry desert of the African continent - Kalahari, excites the scientific community, adventurers and treasure hunters.
On November 7, 1885, Gelarmi Farini made a report on its discovery to members of the Berlin Geographical Society. On March 8, 1886, he repeated the same lecture before the Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain. In the same year, in London, Farini published his book "Through the Kalahari Desert", in which, in particular, he described the discovery of the lost city. At the first stage, all these messages aroused genuine interest.
The personality of the discoverer himself was also legendary. Canadian William Leonard Hunt worked as a salesman in a shop and was going to marry the owner's daughter. Once, with his bride, he attended the performance of the Great Blonde (circus name), who walked the tightrope over Niagara Falls. What he saw shocked him so much that he decided to repeat these tricks.
However, William's future relatives did not like these plans. Hunt lost his job and fiancée. But the world has found the great tightrope walker Farini - this is the pseudonym Hunt chose for himself for performances. For a long time he tried to surpass the exploits of the Great Blond, to overshadow his frenzied fame. Once, for example, the Blond, on a tile he brought with him, in the middle of a rope hanging over Niagara Falls, fried an omelet. Farini immediately lowered a bucket on a rope, scooped up Niagara water and washed a dozen handkerchiefs in the same place. Farini's fame thundered around the world. Later he began working as an impresario and organized various amazing shows, both in America and in Europe.
Once, while organizing a show where live Africans were the "exhibits", Farini met Gert Kurt Lowe. Lowe was born to Bush and White in South Africa. His stories about the enormous riches of these lands, primarily about diamonds, so inflamed Farini's imagination that he decided to travel to this part of the world far from civilization.
Farini, his son Lulu, and Love, who accompanied them, arrived in Cape Town in early January 1885 on the steamer Roslyn Castle. By rail, they managed to reach Hopetown station, located on the Kalahari border. Their further journey took place in a van harnessed first by mules, and later by oxen and buffaloes. Accompanied by hired half-blood hunters, and holding a homemade map of the Kalahari acquired from a German engineer, Farini headed deep into the desert. During the trip, he hunted and collected a collection of local insects.
Finally, the travelers made the major discovery of their expedition. “We set up camp at the foot of the mountain, at a rocky ridge that looked like a Chinese wall after the earthquake. It turned out to be the ruins of a huge structure, covered with sand in places. We took a careful look at these ruins, nearly a mile long. They were a pile of huge hewn stones, and in some places between them traces of cement were clearly visible … In general, the wall was in the shape of a semicircle, inside which, at a distance of about forty feet from each other, were heaps of masonry in the form of an oval or obtuse ellipse with a height of one and a half ft … Since they were all in one way or another covered with sand, we ordered all our people to dig out the largest of them with shovels (and this work was clearly not to their taste) and foundthat the sand protected the joints from destruction. The excavation took almost a whole day, which caused a lot of indignation in Jan. He could not understand why it was necessary to dig up old stones. For him, this occupation seemed like a waste of time … We began to dig up sand in the middle of the semicircle and found a pavement twenty feet wide, lined with large stones. The upper layer was composed of elongated stones placed at right angles to the lower layer. This pavement was crossed by another similar one, forming a kind of Maltese cross. Apparently, in the center of it there was once some kind of altar, column or monument, as evidenced by the surviving foundation - dilapidated masonry. My son tried to find some hieroglyphs or inscriptions, but found nothing. Then he took some photographs and sketches. Let people who are more knowledgeable than I judge by them about when and by whom this city was built."
This description, taken from Farini's book Across the Kalahari Desert, is the only account of the mysterious city of Kalahari and has never been seen again. Since the publication of Farini about the existence of a lost city in the middle of the desert, no less than twenty-five expeditions have been organized to search for it. Despite the use of cars and aircraft, no traces of the mysterious monument of centuries have been found.
Promotional video:
Various versions soon began to emerge to explain these failures. The first and simplest was that this mysterious city of Farini simply invented, in order to revive the shaken interest in himself. This version does not stand up to any criticism. The book is written in an interesting way. The story about the discovered city is far from the central place in it, but only one of the episodes. Under these conditions, it made no sense for his son to draw sketches of nonexistent ruins and falsify their photographs.
Professor AJ Clement in 1964 put forward a different, more scientific version. In his opinion, for the ruins of the city Farini took a kind of talus of stones of natural origin. Indeed, the mineral dolorite tends to collapse under the influence of the forces of nature so that it gives the impression of being processed by man. But this version does not explain the presence of cement, which Farini writes about quite specifically. In addition, not a single expedition was able to find dolorite talus, in the slightest degree resembling the described city.
Apparently, the mysterious city of Farini is covered with sand dunes, and the search for it must be continued. A participant in one of the expeditions, a real enthusiast Dr. Peyver wrote on this occasion: “All this is very vague. When you see this desert, you will understand that you can wander among the sand dunes for months and not even come close to the places where the lost city is located."