"O yes; it is improving steadily. All the signs are hopeful, if we can but light upon what is truly the best method of administering the native laws, and get good men to carry the work out."
And still the heavenly sense of unrestrained mental kinship lingered. Happy, yet fearful, Meryl ventured a word of appreciation.
"It must make you glad to feel you are doing such a useful work for a young country. It seems as if ... as if ... it is just what a man might ask to be doing."
He drew himself up with a slightly taut movement, and she divined he did not wish for any personal praise; yet, because a tinge of red showed under the bronze, she was glad she had seized the opportunity to offer a tribute that might at some odd moment heal a passing sense of uselessness and appreciation.
She stood up also, and they moved slowly round the ruins together, while he explained to her much that he had read and gathered and surmised in his leisure hours, not only about the temple itself, but about all the ancient remains and the mysterious people who had dwelt there long ago. Told as he told it, the listener could only find it enthralling, for the man's heart was in his subject; and where another might have rhapsodised or sentimentalised, he only stated certain remarkable facts, and gave her the simple reasons for and against certain deductions, that she might decide her own view for herself.
"But you?..." she questioned at last. "In spite of the scientific men who have scoffed, and their followers who have thrown cold water upon all enthusiastic belief in the antiquity of the ruins, you are quite satisfied that they are really of a very great age, are you not?"
"Absolutely."
"Can you tell me why chiefly?" She smiled a little. "I believe it absolutely myself, but I am afraid it is partly a sentimental belief. Already I love them, and it makes me jealous for them. I feel I cannot bear anyone to throw doubt upon their antiquity."
"It is not easy to explain in a few words, without a great many facts and a lot of detail, but I can tell you one or two salient points. For one thing, Zimbabwe was evidently connected with a gold industry on a very large scale. Mr. Telford Edwards, a well-known and able mining engineer in Rhodesia, measured up, about fourteen years ago, the length, breadth, and depth of most of the then known old workings in Rhodesia, and calculated the cubic contents of what had been taken out. And taking the assay value in each old working to be per ton the same as it is in the reef in each case now, he estimated that at the present value of gold more than one hundred million pounds' worth had been taken out. Even two hundred years ago gold was worth very much more than it is now; so that it is inconceivable that such an amount had been produced within the last two thousand years without any mention of it anywhere. Such a production of gold would have upset the markets of the world."
"Yes," she said eagerly as he paused; "please go on."