Dawson made a second journey to the banks of the Shangani, to carry supplies of food and medicine to the suffering Matabele, and brought back with him several leading natives and the surviving queens of Lobengula. The appearance of these people fully bore out his description of their condition. Though he had selected the strongest and most fit to travel, they were frightfully emaciated, some being reduced by famine and fever to the nearest approach to skeletons possible for a living creature: despite all his care, twenty-five people perished on the journey. On this occasion, Dawson disinterred the remains of Wilson’s party, and brought back with him the thirty-four skulls, most of which, we observed, had been pierced by bullets. These skulls are to be buried in consecrated ground near those grand remains of an unknown civilisation and religion--the ruins of the Zimbabwe temple. Here Mr. Cecil Rhodes proposes to raise a granite monolith to the memory of these brave men. I have seen the site, than which none more suitable could have been selected--a bare rocky mound rising above a wilderness of dense tropical bush and flowering trees, halfway between the pagan temple on the plain and the rugged Zimbabwe _kopjie_, crowned with massive fortifications of immense antiquity. A monument of simple dignity, standing amid these mysterious ruins, and surrounded by this wild and lonely scenery, will produce a most impressive effect. [Illustration: THE SIEGE AND STORMING OF DELHI BY CHARLES LOWE]