Читать книгу Great Zimbabwe, Mashonaland, Rhodesia. An account of two years' examination work in 1902-4 on behalf of the government of Rhodesia онлайн

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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.

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In the soft sunlight of a glorious late afternoon, when calm broods over all and a profound solitude invests the immense panorama of valley, mountain, and sea of jagged kopje ranges as beheld from the summit of the Acropolis Hill some 300 ft. at least above the Zimbabwe Valley, one views a scene of indescribable loveliness. The sharp-cut ranges of hills, deep gorges flanked by cliffs, great crags of rock, and the long and broad Moshagashi Valley with its scattered kraals and patches of native plantations are all as silent as sleep.

The Acropolis itself is still. The long and labyrinthine passages give back no echoes. The temple courts are empty. The tall monoliths, like ghostly sentinels, point upwards to the sky, and the sunlight is fast fading on the ancient dentelle pattern at the Western Temple. These massive ruins, once teeming with a dense and busy population of Semitic colonists of prehistoric times, with their innumerable evidences of Phallic worship and extensive gold-smelting operations, are as quiet as the grave. The cry of a baboon, or scream of an eagle returning to its eyrie high up on the cliffs above the Eastern Temple, alone break the impressive silence enfolding one of the greatest archæological wonders of the Southern Hemisphere.