From Dr. Emil Holub’s work (‘Seven Years in South Africa’) we learn something about a ruin he saw on the Shashi River, which consisted of a wall protecting a hill and formed ‘of blocks of granite laid one upon another, without being fixed by cement of any kind.’ Also at Tati he saw another ruin, forming a long line of protection for a hill, roughly put together on the inside, but on the outside, ‘probably with some view to symmetry and decoration, there had been inserted double rows of stones, hewn into a kind of tile, and placed obliquely one row at right angles to the other. Each enclosure had an entrance facing north.’ He concludes that the ruin was constructed to protect the gold, ‘numbers of pits fifty feet deep being found in the vicinity.’ This pattern, the construction, and the object undoubtedly connect these ruins with those which I shall presently describe. Mr. G. Philips, an old hunter in these parts, said at the Royal Geographical Society’s meeting, November 24, 1890, of the Zimbabwe ruins, ‘They are exactly like others I have seen in the country—the same zigzag patterns and the mortarless walls of small hewn stones. When hunting in the mountains to the west of this I came on a regular line of these ruins, and one must have been a tremendously big place. There were three distinct gateways in the outer wall, which I suppose was at least thirty feet thick at the base, and one of those immense ironwood trees (hartekol), that would have taken hundreds of years to grow, had grown up through a crevice in the wall and rent it asunder.’ He also described another ruin north-west of Tati. ‘The walls are twelve to fifteen feet thick, and it is entered by a passage so arranged as to be commanded by archers from the interior, and it only admits of the passage of one at a time.’ Mr. E. A. Maund, in speaking of the ruins at Tati and on the Impakwe, says, ‘As I have said, these ruins are always found near gold workings; they are built in the same way of granite, hewn into small blocks somewhat bigger than a brick, and put together without mortar. In the base of both of these there is the same herring-bone course as at Zimbabwe, though nearer the base of the wall.... The remains on the Impakwe are similar in construction and are within fifty yards of the river; it was evidently an octagonal tower.’ Mr. Moffat, our political agent in Matabeleland, in speaking to me about this ruin, told me how it had been much demolished during his recollection, owing to the fact that all waggons going up to Matabeleland outspan near it, and the men assist at its demolition. There is another ruin of a similar character near where the River Elibi flows into the Limpopo, and another further up the Mazoe Valley than the one we visited. [7]