Free The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba by Robin Brown-Lowe

afresh the treasure house of antiquity, equipped with resources of which the deft Phoenicians never dreamed.
    It may be that he will come upon such relics among the abandoned workings as will throw a new light upon the story of his predecessors, and re-write a page of the world’s history.
    It may even be he will stumble into chambers of subterranean wealth such as Mr Haggard had imagined, secured with labyrinths like those of the Pyramids, with sliding stones, and all the appropriate witchcraft of an age when human life and human labour were of no account.
    At least, before many years are out, we may expect to see the image of Queen Victoria stamped on the gold with which King Solomon overlaid his ivory throne and wreathed the cedar pillars of his temple.
    For the far-sighted Rhodes, all this purple prose was of great help with fund-raising for the British South Africa Company. Moreover, he had already anticipated the huge public appetite for a more expert opinion on the true origins of the lost city. Mr and Mrs J. Theodore Bent were even now preparing to set sail from England armed with the credentials of the Royal Geographical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

THREE
Dreams of Avarice
    I n spite of all these intriguing leads, the thousands of mines scattered across the land of the Karanga have remained no more than mute evidence of an ancient eldorado. And for more than a century now not a single record, inscription, cryptogram, tablet or stela has ever been found at any of the grand
zimbabwes
to record the output of ancient mines or the people who worked them.
    Perhaps one should say there is no ‘Rosetta stone’ here which has allowed a reading of the many inscribed columns, plinths, statues and a miscellany of stone objects found by Theodore Bent and others at Great Zimbabwe. Nor, as Bent much regretted, is there a trace of an oral tradition about gold.
    When Bent asked these very questions of the natives in the area and on the actual site, it was as if gold had never been produced in Mashonaland. The Karanga, as we have heard, were completely ignorant of a gold industry ancient or modern and, as a result, made no attempt to gather the precious metals themselves. This is actually extraordinary and, so far as I know, unprecedented, for people still living among monumental works of this splendour. Yet the Karanga were also aware of the thousands of ancient gold workings dangerously littering the bush. How did they explain all this to themselves?
    All the early explorers, dos Barros, Mauch and Bent, heard myths of ancient mining and building activities conducted by gods or, in one case, a white race. But these were no better supported than the tales told to dos Barros that god-like creatures had in ancient times been able to raise such monuments when the stones were still soft.
    This ignorance of the value of gold and the tradition of ancient mining has been a problem for the Shona school. Their explanation – that the Karanga did so well from cattle they had no need of gold and were quite happy to barter with foreigners for tools and trinkets which they did value – is in my opinion simplistic, a modern myth no more viable than the old ones. Were the Karanga deaf to the pleadings of early prospectors like Adam Renders who must have revealed the white man’s hunger for gold, if only to his two Karanga wives?
    If you believe the Shona school then it also has to be true that this complacency cost the Karanga their country. The gold in the dust beneath their feet would certainly have bought every man a Mauser and instruction in its use sufficient to free them of enslavement by the Matabele, the Boers, the Portuguese and even Rhodes. The great irony here is that it was Karanga gold, or the promise of it at ‘Ophir’, that bought Rhodes the breech-loading rifles and Maxims that he eventually used to suppress the Matabele and the Shona.
    I prefer to believe that