y country, with alternate stretches of wood and
grass, bold hills on either side, and blue peaked mountains in the
distance. Crossing a low, bare ridge of granite, one sees nearly a mile
away, among thick trees, a piece of grey wall, and when one comes
nearer, what seems the top of a tower just peeping over the edge of the
wall. It is Zimbabwye--a wall of loose but well trimmed and neatly
fitted pieces of granite surrounding an elliptical inclosure; within
this inclosure other half-ruined walls over-grown by shrubs and trees,
and a strange solid tower or pillar thirty feet high, built, without
mortar, of similar pieces of trimmed granite.[51] This is all that
there is to see. One paces to and fro within the inclosure and measures
the width and length of the passages between the walls. One climbs the
great inclosing wall at a point where part of it has been broken down,
and walks along the broad top, picking one's way over the stems of
climbing shrubs, which thrust themselves across the wall from beneath or
grow rooted in its crevices. One looks and looks again, and wonders. But
there is nothing to show whether this grey wall is three centuries or
thirty centuries old. There is no architectural style, no decoration
even, except a rudely simple pattern on the outside of the wall which
faces the east; so there is nothing by which one can connect this
temple, if it is a temple, with the buildings of any known race or
country. In this mystery lies the charm of the spot--in this and in the
remoteness and silence of a country which seems to have been always as
it is to-day. One mark of modern man, and one only, is to be seen. In
the middle of the valley, some three hundred yards from the great
building, Mr. Cecil Rhodes has erected a monument to Major Wilson and
the thirty-seven troopers who fell with him on the Lower Shangani River
in December, 1893, fighting gallantly to the last against an
overwhelming force of Matabili. The monument stands on an eminence
surrounded by the broken wall of some ancient stronghold. It has been
wisely placed far enough from the great ruin not to form an incongruous
element in the view of the latter, and it was an imaginative thought to
commemorate, at a spot in this new land which bears witness to a race of
prehistoric conquerors, the most striking incident in the history of the
latest conquest.

We climbed the rocky height, where the skilfully constructed walls of
the ancient fort show that th