Makhoshini

“WHAT WAS it that you heard about my brother’s journey at Bamangwato?” said Sir
Henry, as I paused to fill my pipe before answering Captain Good.
“I heard this,” I answered, “and I have never mentioned it to a soul till today. I heard
that he was starting for Solomon’s Mines.” “Solomon’s Mines!” ejaculated both my
hearers at once. “Where are they?” “I don’t know,” I said; “I know where they are said
to be. I once saw the peaks of the mountains that border them, but there was a hundred
and thirty miles of desert between me and them, and I am not aware that any white
man ever got across it, save one. But perhaps the best thing I can do is tell you the
legend of Solomon’s Mines as I know it, you passing your word not to reveal anything I
tell you without my permission. Do you agree to that? I have my reasons for asking it.”
Sir Henry nodded, and Captain Good replied, “Certainly, certainly.” “Well,” I began,
“as you may guess, in a general way elephant hunters are a rough set of men, and don’t
trouble themselves with much beyond the facts of life and the ways of Kaffirs. But here
and there you meet a man who takes the trouble to collect traditions from the natives,
and tries to make out a little piece of the history of this dark land. It was such a man as
this who first told me the legend of Solomon’s Mines, now a matter of nearly thirty
years ago. It was when I was on my first elephant hunt in the Matabele country. His
name was Evans, and he was killed next year, poor fellow, by a wounded buffalo, and
lies buried near the Zambesi Falls. I was telling Evans one night, I remember, of some
wonderful workings I had found while hunting koodoo and eland in what is now the
Lydenburg district of the Transvaal. I see they have come across these workings again
lately in prospecting for gold, but I knew of them years ago. There is a great wide
wagon road cut out of the solid rock, and leading to the mouth of the working or
gallery. Inside the mouth of this gallery are stacks of gold quartz piled up ready for
crushing, which shows that the workers, whoever they were, must have left in a hurry,
and about twenty paces in the gallery is built across, and a beautiful bit of masonry it
is.
“’Ay,’ said Evans, ‘but I will tell you a queerer thing than that,’ and he went on to tell
me how he had found in the far interior a ruined city, which he believed to be the
Ophir of the Bible- and, by the way, other more learned men have said the same long
since poor Evans’s time. I was, I remember, listening open-eared to all these wonders,
for I was young at the time, and this story of an ancient civilization, and of the treasure
which those old Jewish or Phoenician adventurers used to extract from a country long
since lapsed into the darkest barbarism, took a great hold upon my imagination, when
suddenly he said to me, ‘Lad, did you hear of the Suliman Mountains up to the
northwest of the Mashukulumbwe country?’ I told him I never had. ‘Ah, well,’ he said,