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It was the night of the full moon nearest to Midsummer Day in the Southern Hemisphere, and towards midnight the large population of Makalanga round Zimbabwe would be celebrating the feast of the full moon with dancing, singing, and doro drinking. This was evidently a special feast, for its advent had been the theme of conversation among our labourers for the past fortnight, and, unlike the other feasts, it was held simultaneously in each kraal, and not at different kraals in turn on alternate occasions.

At nine o’clock all was still and restful. There were no signs whatever of the forthcoming festivities. Passing through Baranazimba’s kraal, on the way to Havilah Camp at Zimbabwe, one found the population had retired to rest. At Mogabe’s kraal the only sign of active life was shown by the village dogs. The night was hot and close, and outside the huts natives were sleeping, each in his blanket. Arrived at Havilah Camp, one found a score of labourers, sublimely free from all anxieties, sleeping on the bare granite outside their huts, but so oppressive was the air that in their slumbers they had thrown off their blankets, and were lying in every conceivable posture, and snoring and talking in their sleep as if dancing and beer-drinking were matters that had not the slightest interest for them. The large full moon was yet some distance from its zenith, but the valleys were flooded with a greenish-grey mistiness, which lay over the high grass and ran up into the kloofs and gorges. The light made distant objects distinctly visible, throwing a mantle of romance over every clump, ridge, and kopje, while it was possible to read tolerably small print without the aid of artificial light.

CONICAL TOWER AND PLATFORM (LOOKING SOUTH), ELLIPTICAL TEMPLE, ZIMBABWE

THE BALCONY, EASTERN TEMPLE, ACROPOLIS

THE PARAPET IS BUILT UPON THE SUSPENDED BOULDER

For fully another hour the silence was unbroken. At last the desultory beating of a village drum at Mogabe’s kraal was heard. Later a drum was sounded at Chenga’s kraal, and another at Bingura’s kraal. The villagers were waking up for the feast. One of our labourers sat up, stretched himself and yawned, and commenced shaking his sleeping comrades. Within a few minutes Havilah Camp was all life. One native reached for his leggings of large nuts with dried kernels inside, others a horn, flute, piano, or harp, but all took two knobkerries, some having assegais. Those who possessed strings of wild-cat tails tied them round their waists. The early hours of evening had been devoted to greasing their bodies and limbs, and in the light of the moon their skins shone like burnished metal. Then began a general practising of dance steps, leapings, war-cries, and most hideous howlings. Meanwhile quite a dozen drums were being sounded up on Mogabe’s Kopje, and these were answered by similar numbers at Chenga’s and the other kraals. Horns were blown, parties of Makalanga, singing and shouting, were passing along the native tracks in front of our camp, each party going to its own kraal. Soon our labourers left in gangs for their respective villages and disappeared in the long mist-covered grass. Being all young men with a superabundant fund of spirits, they made a most fearful din in the course of their progress homewards. By this time the Zimbabwe kopjes resounded with singing, especially of girls’ singing, for the women-folk started the festivities with screams and yells, and the loud beatings in three-two time of innumerable drums. The great full moon was now fast approaching its zenith. Our camp, save for the watch-men, the kya (hut) boy, and the picaninni, once more became still and lifeless.

Theodore Bent saw in these new and full-moon feasts some connection with the cult of Nature Worship of the ancient Semites, who are believed to have built these ruins and to have mined for gold in Southern Rhodesia, as it is conjectured, some three thousand years ago. The women, who at this moment are dancing in the villages, have on their bare stomachs, worked into the skin, a “breast and furrow pattern,” identical to that found on many of the oldest of the prehistoric relics discovered in our ancient ruins, an undoubted emblem, Bent contended, of the ancient conception of Fertility. The men who will be dancing have worked in their skins, mainly in bands round their waists, the three radiating bars, similar in form to the Welsh bardic emblem of the Origin of Life. The articles they will wield in their dancing are carved with chevron pattern, one of the most ancient of all emblems of Fertility. But although the flesh decorations are now merely luck signs, neither man nor woman would on any account be without them. With these signs they say they will not be sick, will have plenty of wives and boys to work for them, and many girls on account of whom to receive lobola (marriage present to the father—practically purchase money). Anon, in the pauses of the dance, they will drink beer from pots with herring-bone pattern encircling the lips, a beer made of red millet, prepared, says Bent, in the same way and known by the same name as the beer prepared in Arabia to-day, where its methods of preparation and its name have been handed down from immemorial age.

But to-night will be the finest opportunity for the next twelve months of seeing the Elliptical Temple by moonlight. Sleep this hot, close night is impossible, especially with the sounds of noisy revelry proceeding simultaneously from all points of the compass. My native boy is disinclined to follow me to the temple, but after bargaining with him for an Isi-hle (present), he at last grudgingly consents. He mutters something about the place being bewitched, that there are many horrid things there, and alludes to the M’uali, the chief spirit of Makalanga awe and dread; but as within the two years’ residence at Zimbabwe I have only discovered two natives, and these elderly men, who would willingly go into any of the ruins, especially the temple, after darkness had settled down, I am not at all surprised at his reluctance to follow me there. However, he is mindful to take his stoutest knobkerries with him.

Looking back at the Acropolis Hill, and at its long line of precipice, one sees the ancient walls on the summit gleaming white in the moonlight, while the tall monoliths stand clear against the sky. In the passages on the hill one might almost expect on such a night to come face to face with Rider Haggard’s She at any corner, or to see her draped form issuing from one of the numerous caves which still pierce the cliffs. But we must turn our backs on the Acropolis Hill, and make for the Elliptical Temple, passing the little graveyard where the remains of Major Alan Wilson and his Shangani heroes rest in their granite tomb in the grove of euphorbia trees, whose branches cast black, sharp-cut shadows on the ground. Then across an open granite space, and up the long parallel passage on the east side of Ridge Ruins, out through its intricate southern entrance, and on to the level ground which runs up to the foot of the temple walls. The clumps of tall, old-world-looking aloes and euphorbia trees lining the walls of No. 1 Ruins on the left of our path appear strange even by daylight, but in the midnight radiance of the full moon they assume intensely weird and fantastic forms thoroughly in harmony with the outlines of the ancient buildings. The lonely grave of Thomas Bailey, an Australian gold prospector, lies close to the right-hand side of the path. He died in 1893 while searching for relics within the temple.

The temple walls covered with white lichen appear to have been whitewashed for centuries, and these gleam brightly with light in distinct contrast to the dark veld and bush from which they rise; and so white are they that at a fair distance one can see every course, block, and joint in their dry masonry. The broad bases of the walls in comparison with the widths of their summits—though a full-sized wagon and a team of sixteen oxen could stand upon the top of the more substantial portion of the walls—their sloping sides, and the utter absence of any feature of any style of architecture known in Western Europe, lend a strikingly Eastern appearance to the building, which is sufficient in itself to forcibly take one’s mind back some two or three thousand years. Meanwhile the noise of village drums, the blowing of horns, and the deep wild choruses of crowds of men, mingled with the voices of women and girls, were waxing louder and more incessant as midnight approached.

Standing in No. 5 Enclosure, just within the west entrance, the interior of the temple is seen to be full of light and shadow. But all is serenely calm and still as if possessed by the silence of the grave. The high, massive walls encircling the temple deaden to faintness the voices of the villagers. The close air, heavy with the scent of verbena wafted in from the veld, is oppressive in the extreme. An inexplicable sensation of trespassing in forbidden precincts possesses one. The native looks scared. Midnight visits to ruins are not his particular fancy.

Certainly the many visitors who travel hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to view these ruins, and who only see them by the glare of day, miss nine-tenths of the charm, fascination, and inspiration which the walls of the temple at Zimbabwe have in store for those who walk its courts in the stillness of the night when the midsummer moon is at the full. This is the time to see Zimbabwe aright, for Zimbabwe by day and Zimbabwe by night presents two entirely different aspects.

Trees throw gigantic shadows on the walls and darken the inner courts, and the floors are chequered by moonbeams shining through the foliage overhead. One somehow becomes possessed with the idea that these walls are peopled with the spirits of prehistoric age, who are moving, as of old, about the temple floors and passages, still performing their ancient priestly offices. The movement of every shadow against the walls suggests the passing from point to point of some three-millenniumed spectral form, too engrossed in its sacred avocations to heed the mortal presence of two strangers of the twentieth century after Christ. Would that these hoary-aged walls could speak and tell us of the scenes which took place here when the Great Zimbabwe was in all its glory! Assuredly a midnight hour spent in this ancient temple overwhelms one with most novel sensations, some slightly queer and shivery, others awe-inspiring and soul-stirring.

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.