After a little conversation had passed between us, a woman, one of the chief’s wives, made her appearance, bending her body humbly, and carrying a large pot full of wa-wa, as they term beer in this part of the country. This she presented to her lord and master on bended knee, after having previously drunk a little herself, to convince us that there was no poison in it; then the chief took a drink, then his councillors, and finally it was handed to us. We found it was lovely beer, very potent, and after our long abstinence from anything so intoxicating, as exhilarating as the air. We were much struck by the courteous manners of the natives here. One man, on receiving a present, bowed low and scraped the ground with his feet. There is something about these people which points distinctly to a higher form of civilisation having existed amongst them at a former time; and when one reads Dos Santos’s account of the Mocarangas of Monomatapa of his day, one cannot help feeling that they are the remnant of that higher civilisation about which the early Portuguese travellers tell us so much. ‘The Portuguese,’ says Dos Santos, ‘did not enter the king’s presence, like the Kaffirs, with deep obeisance, only with bare feet;’ and in a curious old treaty published in the Portuguese Yellow-book, and purporting to have been made between the Monomatapa chief Manuza and Manuel Gomes Serrao in 1629, the following stipulation is inserted:— ‘The ambassadors who shall come to speak with him shall enter his Zimbahe covered and shod (with boots on their feet) and with their arms at their sides, as if they were before the King of Portugal. He shall give them chairs upon which to sit, and they shall not be submitted to the ceremony of the clapping of hands.’ Chipunza has another name, Chipadzi. The exact relation between these two names we were unable to ascertain; Chipadzi, however, I believe to be the old dynastic name of the chief. His Zimbabwe, or place of sacrifice, is about a mile from the present village, at a spot called Chittakette, or the Chipadzi’s old town. To this place we were to be taken on the morrow. We found it an interesting old spot, buried in trees and with tomatoes and tobacco plants all amongst the ruined walls. It evidently had had a wooden palisade around it, which had sprouted and produced the venerable trees, and it had an inner fortress with walls encircling it, and low gateways through, with large stone slabs over them. It is an excellent specimen of this rough style of fortress: the walls are from six to eight feet thick, with loopholes out of which to shoot, built with no attempt at keeping even courses, and with mortar. Within the fortress are the remains of huts and granaries, as if the place had not been abandoned for very many years.