archæology) that he had seen on the high plateau of Inyanga, in eastern Mashonaland, some remarkable circular pits lined with stone, and approached in each case by a narrow subterranean passage, which can best be explained by supposing them to have been receptacles for the confinement of slaves occupied in tilling the soil, as the surrounding country bears marks, in the remains of ancient irrigation channels, of an extensive system of tillage where none now exists. The way in which the stones are laid in these pit-walls is quite unlike any modern Kafir work, and points to the presence v of a more advanced race. Putting all these facts together, it has been plausibly argued that at some very distant period men more civilised than the Kafirs came in search of gold into Mashonaland, opened these mines, and obtained from them the gold which found its way to the Red Sea ports, and that the buildings whose ruins we see were their work. How long ago this happened we cannot 'tell, but if the strangers came from Arabia they must have done so earlier than the time of Mohammed, for there is nothing of an Islamic character about the ruins or the remains found, and it is just as easy to suppose that they came in the days of Solomon, fifteen centuries before Mohammed. Nor can we guess how they disappeared: whether they were overpowered and exterminated by the Kafirs, or whether, as Mr. Selous conjectures, they were gradually absorbed by the latter, their civilization and religion perishing, although the practice

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of mining for gold remained. The occasional occurrence among the Kafirs of faces with a cast of features approaching the Semitic has been thought to confirm this notion, though nobody has as yet suggested that we are to look here for the lost Ten Tribes. Whoever these people were, they have long since vanished. The natives seem to

have no traditions about the builders of Zimbabwye and the other ancient walls, though they regard the ruins with a certain awe, and fear to approach them at twilight.

It is this mystery which makes these buildings, the solitary archæological curiosities of South Africa, so impressive. The ruins are not grand, nor are they beautiful; they are simple even to rudeness. It is the loneliness of the landscape in which they stand, and still more the complete darkness which surrounds their origin, their object, and their history, that gives to them their unique interest. Whence came the builders? What tongue did they speak? What religion did they practise? Did they vanish imperceptibly away, or did they fly to the coast, or were they massacred in a rising of their slaves? We do not know; probably we shall never know. We can only say, in the words of the Eastern poet :

"They came like water, and like wind they went."

CHAPTER X

THE KAFIRS: THEIR HISTORY AND INSTITUTIONS

THE curtain rises upon the Kafir peoples when the Portuguese landed on the east coast of Africa in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Arab sheiks then held a few of the coast villages, ruling over a mixed race, nominally Mohammedan, and trading with the Bantu tribes of the interior. The vessels of these Arabs crossed the Indian Ocean with the monsoon to Calicut and the Malabar coast, and the Indian goods they carried back were exchanged for the gold and ivory which the natives brought down. The principal race that held the country between the Limpopo and the Zambesi was that which the Portuguese called Makalanga or Makaranga, and which we call Makalaka. They are the progenitors of the tribes who, now greatly reduced in numbers and divided into small villages and clans, occupy Mashonaland. Their head chief was called the Monomotapa, a name interpreted to mean "Lord of the Mountain or "Lord of the Mines." This personage was turned by Portuguese grandiloquence into an emperor, and by some Euro

pean geographers into the name of an empire; so Monomotapa came to figure on old maps as the designation of a vast territory.

When, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch at the Cape began to learn something of the Kafirs who dwelt to the eastward, they found that there was no large dominion, but a great number of petty tribes, mostly engaged in war with one another. Some were half nomad, none was firmly rooted in the soil; and the fact that tribes who spoke similar dialects were often far away from one another, with a tribe of a different dialect living between, indicated that there had been many displacements of population of which no historical record existed. Early in the present century events occurred which showed how such displacements might have been brought about. In the last years of the eighteenth century Dingiswayo, the exiled son of the chief of the Abatetwa tribe, which lived in what is now Zululand, found his way to the Cape, and learned to admire the military organization of the British troops who were then holding the Colony. Returning home and regaining his throne, he began to organise and drill his warriors, who before that time had fought without order or discipline, like other savages. His favourite officer was Tshaka, a young chief, aiso exiled, who belonged to the then small tribe of Zulus. On the death of Dingiswayo, Tshaka was chosen its chief by the army, and the tribes that had obeyed Dingiswayo were thenceforward known under the

name of Zulus. Tshaka, who united to his intellectual gifts a boundless ambition and a ruthless will, further improved the military system of his master, and armed his soldiers with a new weapon, a short, broad-bladed spear, fit for stabbing at close quarters, instead of the old light javelin which had been theretofore used. He formed them into regiments, and drilled them to such a perfection of courage that no enemy could withstand their rush, and the defeated force, except such as could escape by fleetness of foot, was slaughtered on the spot. Quarter had never been given in native wars, but the trained valour of the Zulus, and their habit of immediately engaging the enemy hand to hand, not only gave them an advantage like that which suddenly made the Spartan infantry superior to all their neighbours, but rendered their victories far more sanguinary than native battles had previously been. Tshaka rapidly subjected or blotted out the clans that lived near, except the Swazis, a kindred tribe whose difficult country gave them some protection. He devastated all the region round that of his own subjects, while the flight before his warriors of the weaker tribes, each of which fell upon its neighbours with the assagai, caused widespread slaughter and ruin all over Southeast Africa. Natal became almost a desert, and of the survivors who escaped into the mountains, many took to human flesh for want of other food. To the north of the Vaal River a section of the Zulu army, which had revolted under its general,