To describe this grand ruin in one chapter would be an utterly impossible task, and any statement of one’s first impressions on walking about the temple ’mid its massive Titanic walls must be altogether inadequate. At any rate, one experienced an overwhelming and oppressive sense of awe and reverence. One felt it impossible to speak loudly or to laugh. And yet the ancient builders were what is termed Pagan—Phallic worshippers with Baal and Astoroth among their divinities, but a people so skilled in Zodiacal, astronomical, and other sciences as to amaze and perplex the savants of to-day. Standing close by the Sacred Cone, near which, according to Colonel Conder, the Syro-Arabian archæologist, the altar was placed, one felt disinclined for conversation. Above on a bough was a large owl, with prominent ears and beautiful yellow eyes, who stared at our daring to trespass on the verge of mystery. At our feet lay innumerable cast-off skins of snakes. One thought of the poet Lowell’s _Lost Angel_, where, speaking of a man so deadening his conscience by constant refusals to listen to the appeals of his attendant good angel, he finds that the angel has at last left him alone. Then was the temple of his heart become desecrated, “the owl and snake inhabit there, the image of the God has gone!” The owl and snake inhabit the Temple of Zimbabwe, the altar of which is now broken down and desecrated, but the odious and unmistakable emblems of Nature Worship are still to be found by the score. Reverence of the hoary age of these buildings seizes one, for some accredited archæologists give the age of some of these ruins as anterior to the time of Moses. One wonders whether Professor Keane’s contention is correct, that Ancient Rhodesia was the Havilah of Genesis, especially when one thinks of the estimated £75,000,000 of gold believed to have been taken by the Ancients from the surface of the gold-reefs of this country before and during the Biblical-Ophir period. But our stay within these massive walls was brief. The writer would have over two years in which to wander in their labyrinthine passages, and to examine their architectural features, and compare them with those of Rhodesian ruins elsewhere, but his friends must start back to Victoria before sunrise next day. On our way to the other important ruins—the Acropolis or Hill Fortress—we visited the grave of Major Alan Wilson and his party[15] who were killed on the Shangani during the flight of King Lo ’Bengula in 1893.