What's the good of him?' said the bar-tender to me. 'If he could
tell us how the Ruins came he might be worth a forty-pound cheque
every month, or at least a twenty one. But he can't.'
We were discussing the new appointment of a Government Curator at
the Mabgwe Ruins. I approved it, the bar-tender did not. I
pleaded that he was a bit exacting, that the Curator had a very
cold scent to puzzle out, and that he had tried plodding about
from ruins to ruins, moling and sapping and mining, not to speak
of writing to the Rhodesian Press. Afterwards I shouldered my
knapsack, sought counsel with my carriers as to ways and means,
crossed the river and took the Ruins road. A motor-car hurtled
past me when I was within two miles. Its driver had been pointed
out to me as a Jo'burg magnate; his passengers I did not know,
but I was soon to know them. I was the first to reach the Ruins
after all; for their arrival time being one o'clock, and their
halting-place a hotel. Civilization demanded that they should
lunch there.
I drank from the fair water by the temple's western approach, and
sat down to smoke under a tree in the precincts. The big cone of
the main tower was just in sight. I had seen the walls before,
and was in no analytical mood; synthesis was enough for me. I
took in with my delighted eyes a roofless dome worthy to be a
temple of some sort, even if it were not, a blue roof that
bettered mere human aspiration, debris testifying to earthly
incompleteness, a broken column with its memento mori all these
were simmering in my vision and my judgment. I half dozed until
the voices of the lunchers began to interest me. They were doing
the rounds rather hastily, lunch having cut into their time, so
short at its very best.
A Church dignitary from our own territory was with them. He
introduced himself to me, and he also introduced an engineer. He
was a patriotic Rhodesian, that dignitary, and denounced McIver,
who had dared to assign to the Ruins a native origin.
'Such nonsense!' he said. 'Believe me, my dear sir, I know the
natives, and I know the natives never built these walls. Poor
creatures; they want firm handling, don't they? They're always in
want of bossing-up. But as for this display of art, they haven't
it in them, and they never had.'
The engineer did not seem interested in what was said, or in what
I answered. He was a man of few words. He went off to the eastern
wall, whither we followed him. I found him poking about there
with a stick. The Jo'burg charioteer was soon fussing along,
hurrying on tea-time. 'He didn't want to get a dose of fever this
trip,' he said. He had heard about our unhealthy season up north,
and the month was now April. He wanted to be back by sunset. So
it came to pass that his party went off to tea with but side-glances
at the hill-fastness.
'I'm neither a baboon nor a nigger,' said their host, when I
proposed that he should go up. After all, it was good-natured of
him to motor the dignitary out, I considered. He himself affected
no sort of interest in antiquities, and the dignified antiquarian
under his care was so wearily keen. I went to tea with them,
postponing my reveries to camping time and night. It was not
until we were eating guavas at the end of our meal that the
engineer came in. Then the Jo'burger told him to hurry up, and
went off to cherish his car. As to the engineer, his scanty
tea-time was not left in peace. The dignitary lectured him on the
true and patriotic theory of Ophir, on Astarte's worship, and
Solomon's gold. He answered very little, but he hinted that there
were difficulties. His lecturer glowed, and appealed to the
Curator, who had just come in, bent and shaken with fever.
Unhappily, yet happily for me, he trod on one of the curator's
archaeological corns and involved himself in an apology. Before
he was out of the wood I had asked the engineer a question or
two.
'No time to talk now,' he said, 'too much cackle. Come and see me
in the town. Or, if I miss you there, I may see you on the road,
mayn't I? I'm due out your way in three days.'
Soon after he was petroled away. I went to camp in a clearing, to
sup, to smoke, to read my guidebook. At last the night aged, and
the moon rose. My carriers slept. I looked up in the night's
starred face and beheld 'Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance'
there. But would I ever live to trace them by 'the magic hand of
chance,' as Keats called the grace of God? I began again to
mumble the lines of my guide-book, and found them rather bare and
dry. I looked up at the vast tapering walls. Why was there no
script there? After all, that trenchant argument outweighed a
many arguments; it scaled up like Brennus's sword, and made for a
clear issue. I looked at the sleeping carriers. Did they hold the
secret, not in tradition, not in history, but in the fleshy
tables of the heart and brain and aspiration of their race? I
went to sleep and dreamed of men building, building, building.
They were building stone kraals for their sacred trusts of kine,
chipping and carving away at their totem hawks and their
crocodiles, breaking limbs and necks over a sky-high tower, with
stones for their bricks, and no slime to make them mortar. How
they sang over their work, and how it grew! Talk of Troy's walls;
if only Kaffirs would start building a Troy, or a Palace of Art,
or a Spiritual City, how the work would go forward to the music
of them! I could hear all the parts in their melodies the
checking and countering and refrains and responses of them. But,
before I woke, the parts were merged in full chorus. With that
unison music in my ears I rose and knelt and rose again hastily.
Then I ran round to the eastern wall under the zig-zag patterns.
I came only just in time to see the sunrise by so doing.
It was three days after that I caught up Spenser, the Government
engineer.
'I have seen buildings in North Africa,' he told me. 'They
weren't much like those at Mabgwe. In the north, if they built
with stones they built with great slabs. But those granite flakes
at Mabgwe were easy for a primitive people to manage a very
primitive people. Very primitive, or why did they build on sand
when, six inches deeper, they might have founded on bed-rock?
They didn't understand arches, seemingly. They weren't very
careful about bond in building, were they? Nor were they very
careful to break joint outside, much less inside, so far as I can
judge. And the script; where is it? And the graves; where are
they? If they were Semites, why didn't they write? If they were
Semites, why didn't they bury? . . . But it isn't as easy as it
looks, the riddle. There are one or two jagged ends that conical
tower, for instance.'
We camped that evening near a Mission. I admired the oblong
iron-roofed church there. It wasn't my style of art, but it seemed
to me fair of its kind.
'Quite good,' growled my expert friend, and he said no more at
the time. He spoke more freely over a last pipe.
'I'm sorry,' he said, 'not to take more interest in this sort of
thing. Only, after all, it's African-built, and Europeans could
do the thing a bit better, couldn't they? This sort of thing
seems rather a wrong line of advance. If I hadn't seen Mabgwe so
lately I mightn't mind so much.'
They showed us to a hut, a very clean one. 'That's better; that's
ever so much better,' he said. On the wall was a rude frieze in
Bushman painting style, but white, not red. I enlightened him as
to tsenza work, as to how you could use the cool watery roots
like crayons.
'Why, that's surely Jezebel looking out of that grain-bin,' he
hazarded. 'But what are those?'
'The dogs to eat her,' I answered.
They were horrid little whelps with human heads. I told him about
certain night-fears common among natives. 'It was a solid
Christian who dared to paint these,' I surmised.
'If you could only get Africans to believe what Christians
believed in the thirteenth century you might see signs and
wonders yet,' he said.
He has not been our way again since April, but I met him at the
Pro-Cathedral Pageant in January. It was organized by a Pageant
Master, our mutual friend the dignitary. Therein Asia, King
Solomon and Sheba's Queen, were represented. Africa was relegated
to her proper Cinderella and Plantation Chorus part. 'Poor
creatures!' Spenser said, with a grimace, and winked at me.
'Come, and I will show you a thing,' he said to me afterwards; 'a
thing I chanced on in the Christmas holidays. It's ten miles out.
I want to inspan at six sharp to-morrow.'
I was guilty of three omissions next day. I cut a clerical
meeting; I flouted the True Romance in the shape of the Pageant's
second performance; I also missed the bazaar of St. Uriel's
Native Church that was held on the Pageant ground. St. Uriel's
structure had been put out to European contract; it was a very
didactic building, so the Pageant-Master told us. We passed it on
our way out to the kopje country.
'About as sensuously lovely as a Pills' advertisement,' was
Spenser's comment. 'A good pity and terror purge.'