THE BUILDER January 1917

A CENTRAL AFRICAN MYSTERY

BY H. RIDER HAGGARD

IF any reader will take the trouble to consult a modern map of
central South Africa, he may see a vast block of territory bounded,
roughly speaking, by the Zambesi on the north and the Transvaal on
the south, by Barotseland and Bechuanaland on the west, and by
Portuguese East Africa on the east, measuring perhaps six hundred
miles square.

Scattered over this huge expanse are found ancient ruins, whereof
about five hundred are known to exist, while doubtless many more
remain to be discovered. These ruins, in spite of certain late
theories to the contrary, it would seem almost certain--or so, at
least, my late friend, Theodore Bent, and other learned persons
have concluded--were built by people of Semitic race, perhaps
Phoenicians, or, to be more accurate, South Arabian Himyarites, a
people rendered somewhat obscure by age. At any rate, they
worshiped the sun, the moon, the planets, and other forces of
nature, and took observations of the more distant stars. Also, in
the intervals of these pious occupations, they were exceedingly
keen business men. Business took them to South Africa, where they
were not native, and business kept them there, until at last, while
still engaged on business, or so it seems most probable, they were
all of them slain.

Their occupation was gold-mining, perhaps with a little trading in
"ivory, almug-trees, apes and peacocks" --or ostriches--thrown in.
They opened up hundreds of gold reefs, from which it is estimated
that they extracted at least seventy-five million pounds' worth of
gold, and probably a great deal more. They built scores of forts to
protect their line of communication with the coast. They erected
vast stronghold temples, of which the Great Zimbabwe, that is
situated practically in the center of the block of territory
delimited above, is the largest yet discovered. They worshipped the
sun and the moon, as I have said. They enslaved the local
population by tens of thousands to labor in the mines and other
public works, for gold-seeking was evidently their state monopoly.

A VANISHED PEOPLE

They came, they dwelt, they vanished. That is all we know about
them. What they were like, what their domestic habits, what land
they took ship from, to what land returned, how they spent their
leisure, in what dwellings they abode, whither they carried their
dead for burial--of all these things and many others we are utterly
ignorant.

But Mr. Andrew Lang, with that fine touch of his, has put the
problem in a little poem that once he wrote at my request for a
paper in which I was interested at the time, so much better than I
can do, that I will quote a couple of his verses:

Into the darkness whence they came,
They passed; their country knoweth none.
They and their gods without a name
Partake the same oblivion.
Their work they did, their work is done,
Whose gold, it may be, shone like fire,
About the brows of Solomon,
And in the House of God's Desire.

The pestilence, the desert spear,
Smote them; they passed, with none to tell
The names of them that labored there;
Stark walls and crumbling crucible,
Strait gates and graves, and ruined well,
Abide, dumb monuments of old;
We know but that men fought and fell,
Like us, like us for love of gold.

The thing is strange, almost terrifying to think of. We modern folk
are very vain of ourselves. We can hardly conceive a state of
affairs on this little planet in which we shall not fill a large
part; when for practical purposes, except for some obscure traces
of blood, our particular race, the Anglo-Saxon, the Teutonic, the
Gallic, whatever it may be, has passed away and been forgotten.
Imagine London, Paris, Berlin, Chicago, and those who built them,
forgotten ! Yet such things may well come about; indeed, there are
forces at work in the world, although few folk give a thought to
them, which seem likely to bring them about a great deal sooner
than we anticipate.

As we think today, so doubtless these Phoenicians, or Himyarites,
or whoever they may have been, thought in their day. Remember, it
must have been a great people that without the aid of steam or
firearms could have penetrated, not peacefully, we may be sure,
into the dark heart of Africa, and there have established their
dominion over its teeming millions of population. 

UNDER THE CONQUERORS

Probably the struggle was long and fierce--how fierce their
fortifications show, for evidently they lived the overlords, the
taskmasters of hostile multitudes; yes, multitudes and multitudes,
for there are great districts in Rhodesia where, for league after
league, even the mountainsides are terraced by the patient,
laborious toil of man, that every inch of soil might be made
available for the growth of food. Yet these fierce Semitic traders
broke their spirit and brought them under the yoke; forced them to
dig in the dark mines for gold, to pound the quartz with stone
hammers and bake it in crucibles; forced them to quarry the hard
granite and ironstone to the shape and size of the bricks whereto
they were accustomed in their land of origin, and, generation by
generation, to build up the mighty, immemorial mass of temple
fortresses.

When did they do it? No one knows, but from the orientation of the
ruins to the winter or the summer solstice, or to northern stars,
scholars think that the earliest of them were built somewhere about
two thousand years before Christ. And when did they cease from
their labors, leaving nothing behind them but these dry-built
walls--for, although they were proficient in the manufacture of
cement, they used no mortar--and the hollow pits whence they had
dug the gold, and the instruments with which they treated it ? That
no scholar can tell us, although many scholars have theories on the
matter. They vanished, that is all. Probably the subject tribes,
having learned their masters' wisdom, rose up and massacred them to
the last man; and in those days there was no historian to record it
and no novelist to make a story of the thing.

Solemn, awe-inspiring, the great elliptical building of Zimbabwe
still stands beneath the moon, which once doubtless was worshipped
from its courts. In it are the altars and the sacred cone where
once the priests made prayer, or perchance offered sacrifice of
children to Baal and to Ashtaroth.

THE PEOPLE OF THE SUN

On the hill above, amidst the granite boulders, frowns the
fortress, and all round stretch the foundation blocks of a dead
city. Here the Makalanga, that is, the People of the Sun,
descendants without doubt of the Semitic conquerors and the native
races, still make offerings of black oxen to the spirits of their
ancestors - or did so till within a few years gone. The temple,
too, or so they hold, is still haunted by those spirits; none will
enter it at night. But of the beginning of it all these folk know
nothing. If questioned, they say only that the place was built by
white men "when stones were soft"; that is, countless ages ago.

What a place it must have been when the monoliths and the carven
vultures, each upon its soapstone pillar, stood in their places
upon the broad, flat tops of the walls, when the goldsmiths were at
work and the merchants trafficked in the courts, when the
processions wound their way through the narrow passages, and the
white-robed, tall-capped priests did sacrifice in the shrines !

Where did they bury their dead, one wonders. For of these, as yet,
no cemetery has been found. Perhaps they cremated them and cast
their ashes to the winds. Perhaps they embalmed them, if they were
individuals of consequence, and sent them back to Arabia or to
Tyre, as the Chinese send home their dead today, while humbler folk
were cast out to the beasts and birds. Or perhaps they still lie in
deep and hidden kloofs among the mountains.

THE FINE SOULS
We have a debt to every great heart, to every fine genius; to those
who have put life and fortune on the cast of an act of justice; to
those who have added new  sciences; to those who have refined life
by elegant pursuits. 'Tis the fine souls who serve us, and not what
is called fine society.--Emerson.


THE BOSTON TEA PARTY
Dec. 18-19, 1773

In seventeen hundred seventy three 
Three ships left Albion's docks with tea.

They little dreamed of what destiny planned
As they sailed away to the western land,
For to Boston harbor they were bound
Where the proud old world got turned around.

Now the Colonist loved his tea to sip 
'Twas the stamp thereon made him "bite his lip."

And he vowed that there would trouble be 
If the King sent on the stamp taxed tea.

So the local Masonic Lodge, you see, 
Planned to have a "party" when came the tea.

And the secret they kept till it came in,-- 
Now soon the festivities would begin.

The communication to order came 
And outlined the details of the "game."

The Junior Warden from labor, then
Called to refreshments the waiting men.

And soon they went out as Indians red, 
And the chief, the Junior Warden, led.

And the whoops that rang in the streets that night 
Were the signals that started the Colonies right.

And on and on to the wharf they flew, 
And no sentry or watchman their errand knew.

Their torches flared that December night, 
And their hatchets gleamed in the sombre light.

And they brushed the sailors aghast aside 
And consigned the tea to the ocean's tide.

And as o'er the railings the chests were flung 
They were smashed with the hatchets deftly swung.

And those "reds" ceased not till the cargoes three 
Were "brewing" away in the "salted sea."

And back to the Lodge they swiftly sped 
As Revere, the Junior Warden, led.

And SOME things were said that had the ring 
Of eternal defiance to the King!

No tax, not agreed, will we ever pay 
On the goods of the realm sent to Boston Bay!

And the Lodge was closed in its due form 
As the gray in the east foretold the morn.

* * *

So it was that this way of "serving the tea" 
Set the fires that made the Colonies free.

And from this time on till victory came 
The Masonic Colonist was "in the game."

And the Nation should ever its tribute pay 
To the "party" that night in Boston Bay.
--L. B. Mitchell, Mich.

THE EMPTY BOATS

Why do I see these empty boats, sailing on airy seas ?
One haunted me the whole night long, swaying with every breeze,
Returning always near the eaves, or by the skylight glass:
There it will wait me many weeks, and then, at last, will pass.
Each soul is haunted by a ship in which that soul might ride
And climb the glorious mysteries of Heaven's silent tide
In voyages that change the very metes and bounds of fate--
O, empty boats, we all refuse, that by our windows wait!
-Vachel Lindsay.

