The Lost City of Zimbabye.

Manawatu Herald, 12 April 1892, Page 3

The Lost City of Zimbabye.

Mr De Waal, a companion of Mr Rhodes in his tour through South Africa, thus describes to the Review of Reviews his visit to the wondrous ruins of Zimbabye :— There is no doubt of Zimbabye being one of the most wonderful relica of antiquity in the whole world. It is a great empty city, built round a rock or citadel in the centre of the rains, like the rock of Edinburgh Castle and the Acropolis at Athens. The circuit of the city I did not measure, but I should say that it must have ' been five miles round. It is wonderful, and as I remarked to Mr Rhodes, if the oharfcered Company will but keep it as it is, it will be as good as a gold mine to them. Mr Bent seemed to me to have been rather too busy in his excavations here and therein search of utensils and of relics of the city builders. It is difficult to say how thickly they packed the people in Zimbabye in the days when it was a great city, full of life and trade, but there must have been a population of 60,000 or possibly 100,000 gathered together round the rock citadel. We walked up and down the desolated streets, and marvelled that a race so civilised, so wealthy, and so powerful, should have so utterly passed away without leaving even a memory of the inhabitants to whom it belonged. Its central point, both in interest and situation, was the Temple of the great Phallus, which, in the opinion of many experts, identifies these forgotten city-builders with cho Phditiioi&ng. It is a building as

large as the Coliseum at Rome, although not so high. The walls are from nine to twelve feet in thickness, and all the interior is in perfect preservation, with the chambors leading to the houses of the priests, and the alter of the great Phallic emblem, upon the tops of which we all could have encamped. These people, whoever they were, were gold smelters, and you can still trace the remains of the furnaces in which they smelted the gold. It is a unique spectacle, a whole city remaining through the ages tenantless, and so entirely forgotten that even a tradition of its existence has not been left.