But daylight is dying fast. Glancing down through the gaps in the outer walls are seen specks of firelight at near and remote kraals where the evening meal is being prepared, and round which the advent of the new moon will soon be celebrated. An adjoining cave with yawning depth and dense blackness does not now appear particularly inviting to the visitor, and yet here relic-seekers unanimously declare was where the ancients kept large stores of gold dust. The Eastern Temple is in semi-darkness, but as one crosses its floor one sees the hole from which some fifty phalli were taken, and the exact spots from which soapstone birds were removed. Here was the site, as Bent conjectured, of the ancient altar. In this temple, it is believed, the ancients celebrated their daybreak ritual, for the arc of the main wall decorated with dentelle pattern, and on which once stood some of the soapstone birds, faces the rising of the sun. Passing along Central Passage, which is perpetually in shadow owing to huge tall boulders on either side, but is now in deepest blackness, crossing Cleft Rock Enclosure, and descending the sunken passage to the outer face of the great west wall of the Western Temple, one arrives where a slight afterglow of the sunset still lingers over the brow of Rusivanga. Again one enters into the deep shadow of a sunken and earth-smelling passage with high side walls, and so rapidly descends the north-west face of the hill, glad to emerge once more into the cool fresh air at a lower level of some 100 ft. High in the west is Venus, the evening star, shining brightly—Venus, or _Almaq_, “illuminating,” the goddess of the earlier star-worshipping Sabæans of Yemen, whose worship the best-qualified scientists believe was practised by the original builders of Zimbabwe. She complacently shines down upon her ruined shrines, and wonders doubtless why these natives should convert the sacred emblems of her worship into pipe-bowls for smoking hemp. The Pleiades have set, for the harvest time is almost over. Orion is sinking towards the western horizon as if with disgust at the land where mere Kafirs[21] call him “The little pig and two dogs.” CHAPTER III A DAY AT HAVILAH CAMP, ZIMBABWE Early to bed, our Makalanga labourers are proportionately early to rise, and as soon as there is sufficient light to enable them to see they are up, stretching their limbs, waking the echoes of the valley with their noisy yawnings, which jar on the lilt of the dawn-anthems of the birds, and sit crouching round fires with their blankets over their shoulders.