who is the leading chief of this district.[52] On
the grave there stands a large earthenware pot, which used to be
regularly filled with native beer when, once a year, about the
anniversary of this old Makoni's death, his sons and other descendants
came to venerate and propitiate his ghost. Some years ago, when the
white men came into the country, the ceremony was disused, and the poor
ghost is now left without honour and nutriment. The pot is broken, and
another pot, which stood in an adjoining hut and was used by the
worshippers, has disappeared. The place, however, retains its awesome
character, and a native boy who was with us would not enter it. The
sight brought vividly to my mind the similar spirit-worship which went
on among the Romans and which goes on to-day in China; but I could not
ascertain for how many generations back an ancestral ghost receives
these attentions--a point which has remained obscure in the case of
Roman ghosts also.

The other curiosity is much more modern. It is a deserted native village
called Tchitiketi ("the walled town"), which has been rudely fortified
with three concentric lines of defence, in a way not common among the
Kafirs. The huts which have now totally disappeared, stood on one side
of a rocky eminence, and were surrounded by a sort of ditch ten feet
deep, within which was a row of trees planted closely together, with the
intervals probably originally filled by a stockade. Some of these trees
do not grow wild in this part of the country, and have apparently been
planted from shoots brought from the Portuguese territories. Within this
outmost line there was a second row of trees and a rough stone wall,
forming an inner defence. Still farther in one finds a kind of citadel,
formed partly by the rocks of the kopje, partly by a wall of rough
stones, ten feet high and seven to eight feet thick, plastered with mud,
which holds the stones together like mortar. This wall is pierced by
small apertures, which apparently served as loopholes for arrows, and
there is a sort of narrow gate through it, only four and a half feet
high, covered by a slab of stone. Within the citadel, several chiefs are
buried in crevices of the rock, which have been walled up, and there are
still visible the remains of the huts wherein, upon a wicker stand, were
placed the pots that held the beer provided for their ghosts. Having
ceased to be a royal residence or a fortress, the spot remains, like the
Escurial,