The interior of this building, as will be seen from the plan, was divided up into chambers, as the other ruins at Zimbabwe, but the walls here are much straighter, and the circular system of construction seems to have been more or less abandoned. I take it that this ruin at Matindela was constructed by the same race at a period of decadence, when the old methods of building had fallen into desuetude.
Outside the walls of the temple or fortress we found many circular foundations, very regularly built of granite blocks, and varying in diameter from six to fifteen feet. They were built in groups at considerable intervals apart, and we counted over forty of them. Some of these circular foundations have a double circle, as if for a step; the probability is that they formed the foundations of stone huts like those found in the Marico district of the Transvaal, and were the homes of the ancient inhabitants under the protecting wing of the temple-fortress. There are no traces of these circular foundations within the walls of the enclosure, but all were found outside within a radius of two hundred yards. There are traces, too, of other buildings about half-way down the slope of the granite hills, two walls parallel to one another, about thirty feet long, with doorways and six circular foundations outside them. There are also two depressions [[140]]on the eastern side of the hill, now filled up with timber, which were probably the quarries from which the builders obtained the stone for their work.
About twelve miles to the north of Matindela, near a mountain called Chiburwe, on another low granite hill, we found another fort with similar circular foundations on the plain around it. This fort is about forty feet in diameter, and the walls are of the best period, with courses far more even than those of Matindela, and the stones of more uniform size and fitting more closely, corresponding to the best of the buildings at the Great Zimbabwe. Here, too, was another gigantic baobab tree, which had grown up in the wall and knocked it down; and here, too, the south-eastern portion of the wall is much better and thicker than the rest, which has in places either never existed or fallen down; but the destruction here was so complete that it was impossible to tell if there ever had been a pattern on it or not. [[141]]
[1] Vide [Chap. IX]. [↑]
CHAPTER V
ON THE ORIENTATION AND MEASUREMENTS OF ZIMBABWE RUINS.
BY R. M. W. SWAN.