While still standing just inside the west entrance some thoughts suggest themselves. The ancients being Nature worshippers of one of the earliest cults, so says Bent, had sought in the erection of their temple to compel the concentration of thought on the heavens alone, for even the reduced heights of the summits of the walls, averaging from 22 ft. to 31 ft., shut off, except for gaps, all views of the surrounding landscape. Nothing is visible save the moon and a skyful of silent, glittering stars. The Pleiades, by the rising and setting of which the Makalanga mark their sowing and harvesting, are sinking towards the W.N.W. horizon, and Orion, which is prominent in the star-pictures of the natives, is following down in their wake. A large area of the sky is hidden by the bright radiance of the full moon. But such high massive walls enclosing the temple, and limiting the view to the sky alone, strike the mind of the stranger unread in the lore of ancient Semitic faiths as the purposed design of the ancient architects, especially so when it is recollected that some of the ancient floors are at a much lower level than the interiors as seen to-day. And just as Britishers in Rhodesia unconsciously turn their gaze at night towards the stars which lie low near the northern horizon, so in the contracted view afforded by the temple walls we can well imagine that during their midnight vigils the eyes of the ancient colonists from the north would, as naturally, frequently and lingeringly glance over the northern wall to gaze on stars known to them in their Homeland. It may be noted, too, that the ancients, as conjectured by Bent and other writers, do not appear to have been greatly interested in the alien stars of the Southern Hemisphere, for in all the ruins in Rhodesia, so far as discoveries have been made, there are no massive stone arcs surmounted with monoliths with mural decorations of old-world emblems of fertility on their outer faces, and with the raised platforms approached by steps, facing towards the south, for all such that are known are directed to some other point of the compass.
Small fragments of granite chips from ancient blocks lie about the floor, and these gleam like stars on the dark ground, and have light-haloes of their own. These suggest the splendid sight these ancient walls must have been when all the newly dressed granite blocks in the faces of the walls sparkled as they must once have done as the fragments gleamed in this glorious moonlight. The walls must have glittered like a fairy palace, as did the castle walls of lordly Camelot. To-day we approach the temple on the same level as the veld, the ground outside having been raised to this level by the silt of ages, but the recently discovered granite cement floors outside the building show that the ancients had to ascend some five feet or more to gain the threshold of the entrance. With such higher elevation for its walls, the temple, when freshly built, or perhaps for centuries afterwards, must have been on moonlit nights a most bewitching sight of splendour. But its glories to-night are those which it has gained from the hand of Time.
But on gaining the central area of the building the inexplicable sensations awakened by the weird and strange surroundings and past associations are intensified, and one’s nerves are forced to be more alive to anything unusual happening. Large bats and night-moths fly unpleasantly close to one’s face. Treading on a rotten stick, and the falling of large dry leaves which rattle on the stones below, make noises sufficient to cause one to turn round expecting the approach of some ancient spectre. A frog in some dark and dank corner startles one with a loud croak of “Work!” The hoot of an owl makes the native start. A low moaning, soughing wind now springing up sweeps round the temple and rustles in the upper branches of the trees.
The temple is now lovely in the extreme. The shadows on the walls are now in quick movement. Fireflies swing their tiny lamps over dark enclosures. The white radiance of the moonlight completely invests the conical tower, its intense whiteness being heightened by the large, thick, and dark-foliaged trees on either side. If but Time’s hour-glass were turned back for some long centuries’ space, what tales could not this tower unfold, what secrets of ancient faiths disclose!
One passes down the ancient stairs, lately uncovered, which lead into the Sacred Enclosure, and finds the long, deep-sunk Parallel Passage wrapt in sepulchral darkness, and realises the force of the dark lore of ancient priestcraft and of prayers muttered at midnight. It is pleasant to regain the interior of the temple, where broad streams of moonlight flood its surface. Seated on the east wall of No. 10 Enclosure, and immediately facing the conical tower, one has a good view all round the temple. Under the dark shades of walls and trees a hundred spectres might be lurking unseen. Amidst such surroundings a score of ancient scenes are pictured in one’s mind—the approaching priests with processional chant emerging through the north entrance from the Sacred Enclosure, the salutation to the emblems of the gods, the light of altar fire and torch reflected upon the walls and upon the sacred golden fillets bound round the brows of the priest, the incense-laden air, the subdued murmurings of the waiting crowd of worshippers, the invocations of the deity by priests who stand upon the high raised platform in front of the conical tower, the mystic rites, dark enchantments, and the pious orgies. The very air feels as if it were teeming with mystery and midnight loneliness. Here appear to rise “the thin throng of ghosts ... with beckoning hands and noiseless feet flitting from shade to shade.”
The rising wind now wafts into the ancient shrine the confused shouting, singing, tom-tom beating, and general clamour of the natives dancing in the villages on the hills around. The air has become decidedly cooler. One is glad to have visited the temple at this hour. It is one of the experiences of a lifetime.
THE ACROPOLIS AT SUNSET
In the soft sunlight of a glorious late afternoon, when calm broods over all and a profound solitude invests the immense panorama of valley, mountain, and sea of jagged kopje ranges as beheld from the summit of the Acropolis Hill some 300 ft. at least above the Zimbabwe Valley, one views a scene of indescribable loveliness. The sharp-cut ranges of hills, deep gorges flanked by cliffs, great crags of rock, and the long and broad Moshagashi Valley with its scattered kraals and patches of native plantations are all as silent as sleep.
The Acropolis itself is still. The long and labyrinthine passages give back no echoes. The temple courts are empty. The tall monoliths, like ghostly sentinels, point upwards to the sky, and the sunlight is fast fading on the ancient dentelle pattern at the Western Temple. These massive ruins, once teeming with a dense and busy population of Semitic colonists of prehistoric times, with their innumerable evidences of Phallic worship and extensive gold-smelting operations, are as quiet as the grave. The cry of a baboon, or scream of an eagle returning to its eyrie high up on the cliffs above the Eastern Temple, alone break the impressive silence enfolding one of the greatest archæological wonders of the Southern Hemisphere.
At this height and on a hill so isolated from its neighbours, and just at sunset when shadows are already gathering in the deep defiles in the cliffs upon its summit, an inexpressible sensation of intense loneliness and solitude asserts itself. No other human foot will tread these ancient approaches to the Acropolis till the sun has risen once again. There is no white man round about for miles, and the natives will not venture near the ruins after sunset. Two hours ago the herd was mindful to drive the goats from the high points on the face of the hill down into the valley. The natives will solemnly inform the stranger that as night approaches the spirits of their departed ancestors buried in the caves of the hill awaken, that the ruins are then bewitched. It may be easily understood that in minds made craven with centuries of slavery to a succession of invaders, and haunted, till the last decade, with constant dread of Swazi and Matabele raids, the standard of Makalanga valour is low indeed, and that at nights they shun these scenes of ancient life is not in the least surprising.