Cinderella in the South | Page 2

to the Ruins a native origin.
'Such nonsense!' he said. 'Believe me, my dear sir, I know the natives,
and I know the natives never built these walls. Poor creatures; they
want firm handling, don't they? They're always in want of bossing-up.
But as for this display of art, they haven't it in them, and they never
had.'
The engineer did not seem interested in what was said, or in what I
answered. He was a man of few words. He went off to the eastern wall,

whither we followed him. I found him poking about there with a stick.
The Jo'burg charioteer was soon fussing along, hurrying on tea-time.
'He didn't want to get a dose of fever this trip,' he said. He had heard
about our unhealthy season up north, and the month was now April. He
wanted to be back by sunset. So it came to pass that his party went off
to tea with but side-glances at the hill-fastness.
'I'm neither a baboon nor a nigger,' said their host, when I proposed that
he should go up. After all, it was good-natured of him to motor the
dignitary out, I considered. He himself affected no sort of interest in
antiquities, and the dignified antiquarian under his care was so wearily
keen. I went to tea with them, postponing my reveries to camping time
and night. It was not until we were eating guavas at the end of our meal
that the engineer came in. Then the Jo'burger told him to hurry up, and
went off to cherish his car. As to the engineer, his scanty tea-time was
not left in peace. The dignitary lectured him on the true and patriotic
theory of Ophir, on Astarte's worship, and Solomon's gold. He
answered very little, but he hinted that there were difficulties. His
lecturer glowed, and appealed to the Curator, who had just come in,
bent and shaken with fever. Unhappily, yet happily for me, he trod on
one of the curator's archaeological corns and involved himself in an
apology. Before he was out of the wood I had asked the engineer a
question or two.
'No time to talk now,' he said, 'too much cackle. Come and see me in
the town. Or, if I miss you there, I may see you on the road, mayn't I?
I'm due out your way in three days.'
Soon after he was petroled away. I went to camp in a clearing, to sup,
to smoke, to read my guidebook. At last the night aged, and the moon
rose. My carriers slept. I looked up in the night's starred face and
beheld 'Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance' there. But would I
ever live to trace them by 'the magic hand of chance,' as Keats called
the grace of God? I began again to mumble the lines of my guide-book,
and found them rather bare and dry. I looked up at the vast tapering
walls. Why was there no script there? After all, that trenchant argument
outweighed a many arguments; it scaled up like Brennus's sword, and

made for a clear issue. I looked at the sleeping carriers. Did they hold
the secret, not in tradition, not in history, but in the fleshy tables of the
heart and brain and aspiration of their race? I went to sleep and
dreamed of men building, building, building. They were building stone
kraals for their sacred trusts of kine, chipping and carving away at their
totem hawks and their crocodiles, breaking limbs and necks over a
sky-high tower, with stones for their bricks, and no slime to make them
mortar. How they sang over their work, and how it grew! Talk of
Troy's walls; if only Kaffirs would start building a Troy, or a Palace of
Art, or a Spiritual City, how the work would go forward to the music of
them! I could hear all the parts in their melodies the checking and
countering and refrains and responses of them. But, before I woke, the
parts were merged in full chorus. With that unison music in my ears I
rose and knelt and rose again hastily. Then I ran round to the eastern
wall under the zig-zag patterns. I came only just in time to see the
sunrise by so doing.
It was three days after that I caught up Spenser, the Government
engineer.
'I have seen buildings in North Africa,' he told me. 'They weren't much
like those at Mabgwe. In the north, if they built with stones they built
with great slabs. But those granite flakes at Mabgwe were easy for a
primitive people to manage a very primitive people. Very primitive, or
why did they build on sand when, six inches deeper, they might have
founded on bed-rock? They didn't understand