Through Veld and Forest: An African Story

by Harry Collingwood

I was now in high feather, for I had already secured, from one village alone, more than seventy pounds of gold, which I estimated must be worth close upon four thousand pounds sterling; and if I could do so well at only one village, what might not I achieve by the time that I had traded away all my “truck”? Already, in imagination, I saw myself back at Bella Vista, with the house rebuilt and furnished in luxurious style, the land amply restocked, and plenty of money in the bank as well! Alas, I little guessed what lay before me; and it was just as well, perhaps, that I did not; otherwise— But I must not get ahead of my story.

With my head full of pleasant visions, and my imagination busily employed in the construction of châteaux en Espagne, we proceeded upon our journey, travelling over undulating country which ahead manifested a disposition to become hilly, and still closely following the course of the stream, until, about noon, we arrived in the midst of what in the distance had appeared to be a cluster of curiously shaped kopjes, but now proved, to my great surprise, to be ruins, thickly overgrown with vegetation. Here, my curiosity being powerfully aroused at so unexpected a sight, and it being also time to outspan, I called a halt; and while Piet busied himself in the preparation of my midday meal, I took my rifle and sauntered off to examine the ruins.

They proved to be very much more extensive than I had imagined, for when I came to inspect them at close quarters I found that the structures which had at first attracted my attention formed but a very small part of the whole, the greater portion of the buildings having been razed to the level of the ground, large heaps of rubbish and the foundations being all that now remained, with the exception of the ruins above-mentioned, of a town or village that had originally covered more than a hundred acres of ground.

But it was to the ruins which had originally arrested my attention that I now chiefly devoted myself, entirely forgetful of the fact that a meal was awaiting me at the wagon. And these remains I found to be extraordinarily interesting, for I had not been among them ten minutes before I became convinced that they were the work of a people of far higher intelligence than the Mashonas—that they must indeed have been built by a race having some pretensions to civilisation. For, while the walls were for the most part built of dry rubble masonry, the lintels and doorposts were of dressed stone, and—most remarkable circumstance of all—were in many cases adorned with sculptures in low relief, of a character strongly resembling those which I had seen portrayed in pictures of Egyptian ruins. For example, there were figures of men ploughing with oxen, driving laden asses, leading by the horns antelopes which were perfectly recognisable as the oryx and springbok, others leading baboons, leopards, giraffes, dogs, lions, and elephants, human figures with heads of birds, lions, and rams, and figures of sphynxes with human heads, or the heads of rams. And these figures were not by any means the rough efforts of uncultured savages; on the contrary, they were distinguished by a precision of line, a delicacy yet firmness of touch, and an artistic beauty that could only have resulted from a very high state of civilisation and culture.

The buildings appeared to be mostly circular in plan, ranging from about thirty to fifty feet in diameter, with walls averaging three feet in thickness, one or more of these being surrounded by an outer wall, approximately elliptical in plan, of some five feet in thickness. There were five of these structures still standing in a sufficient state of preservation to render them recognisable at a distance as buildings, and a great many more—the precise number I did not trouble to ascertain—of which nothing but the foundations remained. I prowled about among these intensely interesting remains for several hours, until close upon sunset in fact, examining them and striving to puzzle out their origin, and then made my way back to the wagon, where I found Piet and Jan rapidly working themselves into a fever of anxiety about my prolonged absence, and earnestly debating the propriety of instituting a search for me.

So profound were the interest and curiosity aroused within me by these remarkable and mysterious relics of a lost and forgotten civilisation that when Piet awakened me on the following morning with my early cup of coffee and the enquiry whether it was my pleasure that the oxen should be inspanned, I determined to devote at least a few hours to their further examination, and issued my instructions accordingly. Then, as soon as we had all breakfasted, I ordered Piet to take the sporting double-barrel while I carried my rifle, and, with the two dogs accompanying us, set out to complete my inspection. But, beyond the finding of an elaborately sculptured stone sarcophagus, which we took the liberty of breaking open, and which contained a mummified human body and several earthenware utensils decorated with exquisite paintings—one of which I appropriated and carried away—we discovered nothing further that was worthy of particular mention; and about two o’clock in the afternoon we inspanned and resumed our journey.

An hour later, however, at a distance of some three miles from the ruins, we arrived opposite a hill of solid rock some four hundred feet in height and about a mile long, in the face of which I observed what I at first took to be the mouth of a cave; but, looking at it more closely, I presently perceived alongside it a great mass of débris. My curiosity again got the better of me, and, calling a halt, I walked over to it and proceeded to examine it at close quarters, with the result that I soon convinced myself that the “cave” and its accompanying mound of débris could be nothing else than an ancient working; while upon entering the opening, which extended inward and downward for a distance of nearly half a mile, I discovered evidence enough to prove that the working was that of an extraordinarily rich gold mine, visible gold showing everywhere in the worked face of the rock! And at once the idea seized me that if I could but contrive to ingratiate myself sufficiently with Lomalindela, His Majesty might be induced to grant me a concession to work the mine, and so place me in possession of wealth “beyond the dreams of avarice”. I thought at first that possibly this might be the identical mine from which the gold in my wagon had come, but a close examination of the working at length convinced me that the rock had remained untouched for ages; and then it occurred to me that perhaps the dead and forgotten inhabitants of the ruined village which I had so recently left might have been the miners.

And now, with every mile of our progress, the country became more broken and hilly, and at the same time more open and park-like, the great masses of bush and scrub with which we had so long been familiar giving place to trees of handsome appearance and noble proportions, growing for the most part singly, but occasionally in clumps of from three or four to a dozen or two, while occasionally the clumps magnified themselves sufficiently to justify the term of a wood, or even a small forest; moreover, the grass was in places profusely dotted with beautiful flowers, while where the trees grew most thickly they were often enwreathed with parasitic growths which, if they were not actually orchids, very strongly resembled them, the blooms they abundantly bore being of the most remarkable and often most beautiful shapes and colours. Thus the broken character of the country, with its accompanying features of swelling hills, scarred here and there with foaming rivulets, ravines, and gorges hemmed in and overhung by lofty trees garlanded with flowering parasites, and intermingled in places with luxuriant shrubs—some of which bore leaves of such curious shapes and brilliant colours that they might easily have been mistaken for flowers—and with birds of strange forms and gaudy plumage flitting hither and thither, was a most agreeable change from the characteristic scenery of South Africa. It was a beautiful and very fertile country, taken as a whole, and the nearer that we drew to Gwanda the more forcibly was this fact borne in upon me, as also was the further fact that the Mashonas were a very powerful nation, so far at least as numbers were concerned; for every kraal at which we arrived was bigger and more important in every way than the one that preceded it.

The evening of the sixth day after we had crossed the Limpopo found us outspanned upon the left bank of the stream which we had been closely following from the moment of our passage of the river, with a lofty, flat-topped mountain range, some fifty miles long, on our left hand, springing from the plain close to the opposite margin of the stream, and on our right two enormous mountains, some twenty miles apart from peak to peak, and remarkable for their exceptional height—which I estimated at fully fourteen thousand feet—as well as from the fact that they were identical not only in shape, but also apparently in size and altitude. In shape they were almost hemispherical, and to add to their similarity each bore on its very summit a protuberance very much resembling in appearance a beehive-shaped Kafir hut, but much larger, being probably quite two hundred feet in height. The tops of these remarkable mountains were covered with snow for a distance of about two thousand feet from the summit, and very beautiful they looked, blushing a soft, delicate pink in the last rays of the setting sun. The ground between the two mountains—which I took to be a pair of long-extinct volcanoes—and the range on our left rose steadily, and therefore somewhat retarded our progress when we continued our trek on the following day; but about two o’clock in the afternoon we reached the summit of the slope and saw before us a valley or basin, roughly circular in shape and some twenty miles in diameter, hemmed in on all sides by hills, some of which were lofty enough to be snow-capped on their summits; and in the very centre of this valley lay Gwanda, the Kraal or Place of Lomalindela, the king of the Mashona nation.

It was an immense place, far exceeding in dimensions the biggest native kraal that I had ever yet seen. It was circular in plan, like the other Mashona kraals that I had passed on my way, and, also like them, it was intersected by two main roads or streets, crossing each other at right angles in the centre of the kraal, one road running due north and south, while the other ran east and west. Each of these roads was about two and a half miles long, with a great gate at either extremity, pierced in the high and strong circular palisade which completely surrounded the kraal; and at the point where these two main roads intersected in the centre of the kraal each was widened in such a manner as to form a great square about one hundred and sixty acres in extent, this doubtless being the spot where all business of a ceremonial character was conducted.