fortresses for separate communities, the inhabitants
dwelling in beehive huts of mud around. This, to
my mind, is the probable restoration of this ancient
African settlement.
Down the valley to the north-west runs a long
wall of irregular stones, roughly put together, for a
mile or more—such a wall as Kaffirs would erect
to-day to protect themselves from the advance of
an enemy. This I do not connect with the more
ancient and regularly built edifices, but it probably
owes its erection to a period when Zulu hordes
swept down on the more peaceful and effeminate
descendants of the Monomatapa.
Many were the miles we walked in every direction,
around and on the hill fortress, to the east,
west, north, and south, intent on one object—namely,
that of finding indications of a cemetery, which the
ancient inhabitants of these ruins might have used—
but our searches were always in vain. Kaffir remains
we found in abundance, and a small cemetery
of some twenty graves of rough stone piled over the
bodies, about ten miles from Zimbabwe, also Kaffir,
but nothing else. Consequently we came to the
conclusion that the ancient inhabitants, who formed
but a garrison in this country, were in the habit of
removing their dead to some safer place. This plan
seems to have a parallel in Arabia in antiquity, a
notable instance of which is to be found on the
Bahrein Islands, in the Persian Gulf, where acres and
acres of mounds contain thousands of .tombs, and no
vestige of a town is to be xound anywhere near