The story of The Lost City of the Kalahari (Rietfontein)

Easy read section is below the image.

For more than a century rumours have abounded as to the existence of a massive city covered by the sands of the Kalahari.

The rumors all started in the late 1800's from an American explorer by the name of Guillermo Farini, who visited the Kalahari in 1895 to look for diamonds.

The performer William Leonard Hunt changed his name to Signor Guillermo Antonio Farini and became famous for his tightrope walk across Niagara Falls where he was famous as "Farini the Great". During his life Farini was an inventor, explorer, writer, secret service agent, painter and sculptor.

The Lost City

Farini described the city as one of colossal proportions made from massive stones stacked on top of each other. The city was laid out in an arc and resembled the Great Wall of China after an earthquake. Part of the city was exposed and part hidden under the sand.

Digging away some of the sand exposed a pavement six meters wide with the longer stones laid at right angles to the path. Intersecting the pavement at right angles was another pavement, making a type of cross.

There were no inscriptions or markings to be found anywhere, and Farini estimated the ruins to be thousands of years old.

Does the Lost City really exist?

Since Farini there have been about 30 expeditions to find the Lost City, but none have been successful.

In 1984 Prof AJ Clement, journalist and photographer, visited the town of Rietfontein where he was shown an extremely unusual "rock formation" known as eggshell hills. The unmistakable cutline of a large, oval shaped amphitheatre, perhaps a third of a mile in lenght, was the predominant feature.

In numerous places there was a striking resemblance to a double wall built from large black rocks. "It was obvious that many of the individual boulders could easily be confused with square building blocks", Clement wrote later in his book The Kalahari and its Lost City.

A geologist who saw photographs of the site suggested that the "ruins" were the product of the weathering of dolerite.

Clement was convinced that Farini's city was a natural formation and not a Lost City.

"However, the rocks are all neatly squared and the lines of masonry are parallel and at right angles". Some formations, such as basalt, do indead crystalize in regular patterns, but not like the dolerite rocks at Rietfontein.

The final proof is Clement's own photo of one of the massive blocks with a series of four parallel, horizontal grooves on it. Was it an ancient city? Was it natural? Was it what Farini had found?

There seems to be no clear answer on any of these questions, or did the sands of the Kalahari cover the city, hiding it to be discovered once more in the future?

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For fun we did our own searches. The closest we could find to the descriptions given was these photo's we have taken not far from Rietfontein, on the Koppieskraal Pan campsite. One could play tubular bells on these boulders, as they each emit a different sound. You will note that I have a stone in my hand.

Also read the piece on the farm that the below images relates to.