The country about here is very thickly wooded, and we had a glorious ride next morning to the ruins we wished to visit, about five miles distant, across rushing streams overhung with verdure, and in which alluvial gold is still found in small quantities. Here we saw specimens of those curious birds with long tail-like feathers at the end of their wings, which can only fly for a short distance, and seem overweighted by nature for some peculiar freak of her own. There are, too, all up this country many varieties of small birds with tail feathers four or five times their own length, which droop as they fly. These birds seem to me to resemble closely the one depicted on the temple of Deir-el-Bahari in the representation of a village in Punt (Mariette’s ‘Deir-el-Bahari,’ plate v.), identified as the Cinnyris metallica, and found all along the east coast of Africa. We reached the ruin in good time, and halted by it for a couple of hours. It is a small ancient fort, built, as usual, on a granite kopje, and constructed with courses of wonderful regularity, equal to what we term the best period of Zimbabwe architecture. Not much of the wall was standing; enough, however, to show us that the fort had been almost twenty feet in diameter, and to cause us to wonder where the remaining stones could have gone to, as there are no buildings or Kaffir kraals anywhere near it. This is another of the many mysteries attached to the Mashonaland ruins; where the walls are ruined the stones would seem to have entirely disappeared. This difficulty confronted us at several places, and I am utterly at a loss to account for it. The fort, as it stands now, is exceedingly picturesque, in a green glade with mountains shutting it in on all sides; fine timber grows inside it and large boulders are enclosed within the walls. It was obviously erected as a fort to protect the miners of the district, and is a link in the chain of evidence which connects the Zimbabwe ruins with the old workings scattered over the country. On our homeward journey we visited a lot more ancient workings, some of which are being opened by the present occupiers, who seemed tolerably well satisfied with their properties, despite the strictures which had been passed by experts, that the gold reefs in the Mazoe Valley ‘pinched out’ and did other disagreeable things which they ought not to do. From a picturesque point of view the Mazoe Valley is certainly one of the pet places in Mashonaland: the views in every direction are exquisite, water is abundant everywhere, and verdure rich; and if the prospectors are disappointed in their search for gold, and find that the ancients have exhausted the place, they will have, at any rate, valuable properties from an agricultural point of view.