Owing to our previous arrangements we were obliged to return to Fort Salisbury the next day, regretting much that we had not time to proceed farther up the Mazoe Valley, where, about forty miles farther on, is another great centre of ancient industry. I was told of another ruin there, probably built for the same defensive purpose; it is near a Kaffir village called Chipadzi’s. About twenty-five miles farther up the valley from the commissioner’s is Mapandera’s kraal on the Sangwe River, a tributary of the Mazoe or Mazowe. Here, on the Inyota Mountain, gold is said to be plentiful and old workings very numerous, as many as seventy-five crushing-stones having been counted on one single claim. Twenty miles south-east of Mapandera’s is Chipadzi’s kraal, and a few miles from here in the mountains is another ruin, described to me as being a circular wall round a kopje from 150 to 200 feet in diameter. This wall is in a very ruined condition, being not more than four feet in height, but the courses are reported to be quite as regular as those of Zimbabwe, which appears to be the crucial test in classifying these remains of ancient workmanship. It has no entrance, and the natives thereabouts did not appear to know anything about it or attach any special interest to it. The Mazoe Valley is frequently alluded to in early Portuguese enterprise, being easily approachable from the Zambesi, and the river is, I am told, navigable about eighty miles below where we struck it. Couto, the Portuguese writer, thus speaks of the gold mines here in his quaint legendary style: ‘The richest mines of all are those of Massapa, where they show the Abyssinian mine from which the Queen of Sheba took the greater part of the gold which she went to offer to the Temple of Solomon, and it is Ophir, for the Kaffirs called it Fur and the Moors Afur ... the veins of gold are so big, that they expand with so much force, that they raise the roots of trees two feet.’ He fixes the spot which he here alludes to farther on when speaking about the three markets held by the Portuguese in these parts: ‘(1) Luanhe, thirty-five leagues from Tete South, between two small rivers, which join and are called Masouvo; (2) Bacoto, forty leagues from Tete; and (3) Massapa, fifty leagues from Tete up the said River Masouvo.’ Now the Mazoe, which, doubtless, in the native tongue, is the Maswe, like the Pungwe, Zimbabwe, &c., joins the Zambesi just below Tete.