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 roasting, which shows that the workers, whoever they were, must have left in a hurry.  Also, about twenty paces in, the gallery is built across, and a beautiful bit of masonry it is.”

“‘Ay,’ said Evans, ‘but I will spin you a queerer yarn 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 civilisation and of the treasures 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 ever hear of the Suliman Mountains up to the north-west of the Mushakulumbwe country?’ I told him I never had.  ’Ah, well,’ he said, ’that is where Solomon really had his mines, his diamond mines, I mean.’

“‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

“’Know it! why, what is “Suliman” but a corruption of Solomon?[*] Besides, an old Isanusi or witch doctoress up in the Manica country told me all about it.  She said that the people who lived across those mountains were a “branch” of the Zulus, speaking a dialect of Zulu, but finer and bigger men even; that there lived among them great wizards, who had learnt their art from white men when “all the world was dark,” and who had the secret of a wonderful mine of “bright stones."’

[*] Suliman is the Arabic form of Solomon.—­Editor.

“Well, I laughed at this story at the time, though it interested me, for the Diamond Fields were not discovered then, but poor Evans went off and was killed, and for twenty years I never thought any more of the matter.  However, just twenty years afterwards—­and that is a long time, gentlemen; an elephant hunter does not often live for twenty years at his business—­I heard something more definite about Suliman’s Mountains and the country which lies beyond them.  I was up beyond the Manica country, at a place called Sitanda’s Kraal, and a miserable place it was, for a man could get nothing to eat, and there was but little game about.  I had an attack of fever, and was in a bad way generally, when one day a Portugee arrived with a single companion—­a half-breed.  Now I know your low-class Delagoa Portugee well.  There is no greater devil unhung in a general way, battening as he does upon human agony and flesh in the shape of slaves.  But this was quite a different type of man to the mean fellows whom I had been accustomed