PROLOGUE

[AFRICA AND HER SISTERS.]

Some fifteen years now I have been her guest,
For all this land's hers, tho' she does not reign.
She's but a ward, at what late age she'll gain
Her freedom and her kingdom, it were best
To risk no surmise rash. E'en now she's drest
Sometimes in skins. Give her ground-nuts and grain,
Cattle and thatch'd hut, then she'll not complain,
She's happier-hearted than her Sisters blest.

Her Sisters blest! Of them what shall I say?
I like them better when they keep away,
And toil in their own lands, not loll in hers.
They use her ill. She's not so old as they.
She drudges for them. But her youth confers
A charm on her they've lost these many years.

THE THING THAT HATH BEEN

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.