one of the curator's archaeological corns and involved himself in an apology. Before he was out of the wood I had asked the engineer a question or two.

'No time to talk now,' he said, 'too much cackle. Come and see me in the town. Or, if I miss you there, I may see you on the road, mayn't I? I'm due out your way in three days.'

Soon after he was petroled away. I went to camp in a clearing, to sup, to smoke, to read my guidebook. At last the night aged, and the moon rose. My carriers slept. I looked up in the night's starred face and beheld 'Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance' there. But would I ever live to trace them by 'the magic hand of chance,' as Keats called the grace of God? I began again to mumble the lines of my guide-book, and found them rather bare and dry. I looked up at the vast tapering walls. Why was there no script there? After all, that trenchant argument outweighed a many arguments; it scaled up like Brennus's sword, and made for a clear issue. I looked at the sleeping carriers. Did they hold the secret, not in tradition, not in history, but in the fleshy tables of the heart and brain and aspiration of their race? I went to sleep and dreamed of men building, building, building. They were building stone kraals for their sacred trusts of kine, chipping and carving away at their totem hawks and their crocodiles, breaking limbs and necks over a sky-high tower, with stones for their bricks, and no slime to make them mortar. How they sang over their work, and how it grew! Talk of Troy's walls; if only Kaffirs would start building a Troy, or a Palace of Art, or a Spiritual City, how the work would go forward to the music of them! I could hear all the parts in their melodies the checking and countering and refrains and responses of them. But, before I woke, the parts were merged in full chorus. With that unison music in my ears I rose and knelt and rose again hastily. Then I ran round to the eastern wall under the zig-zag patterns. I came only just in time to see the sunrise by so doing.

It was three days after that I caught up Spenser, the Government engineer.

'I have seen buildings in North Africa,' he told me. 'They weren't much like those at Mabgwe. In the north, if they built with stones they built with great slabs. But those granite flakes at Mabgwe were easy for a primitive people to manage a very primitive people. Very primitive, or why did they build on sand when, six inches deeper, they might have founded on bed-rock? They didn't understand arches, seemingly. They weren't very careful about bond in building, were they? Nor were they very careful to break joint outside, much less inside, so far as I can judge. And the script; where is it? And the graves; where are they? If they were Semites, why didn't they write? If they were Semites, why didn't they bury? . . . But it isn't as easy as it looks, the riddle. There are one or two jagged ends that conical tower, for instance.'

We camped that evening near a Mission. I admired the oblong iron-roofed church there. It wasn't my style of art, but it seemed to me fair of its kind.

'Quite good,' growled my expert friend, and he said no more at the time. He spoke more freely over a last pipe.

'I'm sorry,' he said, 'not to take more interest in this sort of thing. Only, after all, it's African-built, and Europeans could do the thing a bit better, couldn't they? This sort of thing seems rather a wrong line of advance. If I hadn't seen Mabgwe so lately I mightn't mind so much.'

They showed us to a hut, a very clean one. 'That's better; that's ever so much better,' he said. On the wall was a rude frieze in Bushman painting style, but white, not red. I enlightened him as to tsenza work, as to how you could use the cool watery roots like crayons.

'Why, that's surely Jezebel looking out of that grain-bin,' he hazarded. 'But what are those?'

'The dogs to eat her,' I answered.

They were horrid little whelps with human heads. I told him about certain night-fears common among natives. 'It was a solid Christian who dared to paint these,' I surmised.

'If you could only get Africans to believe what Christians believed in the thirteenth century you might see signs and wonders yet,' he said.

He has not been our way again since April, but I met him at the Pro-Cathedral Pageant in January. It was organized by a Pageant Master, our mutual friend the dignitary. Therein Asia, King Solomon and Sheba's Queen, were represented. Africa was relegated to her proper Cinderella and Plantation Chorus part. 'Poor creatures!' Spenser said, with a grimace, and winked at me.

'Come, and I will show you a thing,' he said to me afterwards; 'a thing I chanced on in the Christmas holidays. It's ten miles out. I want to inspan at six sharp to-morrow.'

I was guilty of three omissions next day. I cut a clerical meeting; I flouted the True Romance in the shape of the Pageant's second performance; I also missed the bazaar of St. Uriel's Native Church that was held on the Pageant ground. St. Uriel's structure had been put out to European contract; it was a very didactic building, so the Pageant-Master told us. We passed it on our way out to the kopje country.

'About as sensuously lovely as a Pills' advertisement,' was
Spenser's comment. 'A good pity and terror purge.'

I sighed indulgently.

'It's very popular, I've heard, among the town boys. It's so very
European to native eyes, so extra corrugated and angular.'

We came up at last to that which we sought a huge ellipse and dome of stones and earth, rising and broadening under our very eyes. It was on a farm among the granite hills, many miles from Rosebery. 'It's only a glorified stone cattle-byre, and an intensified stone Kaffir hut,' Spenser commented. 'It's not even built the old Mabgwe way. These are only blocks of granite; a few of them broken, but not one of them dressed. And there's lots of mud to eke them out.'

'Yet there's hope in the thing. It's not an artistic dead-end like Saint Uriel's,' I pleaded.

One or two Europeans, very unskilled ones I could see, had planned this bit of work, and taken part in it. They had made themselves at charges for it, though African gifts had not been wanting. They had, so to speak, coaxed their African pack on to try an old scent. Now the moving European spirit was gone home for months to England. Before he went the former rains had ruined some of the work. He had been too ambitious, too scornful of delay. Forewarned by Africans, he had pressed to a midsummer disaster. Now he had left Africans in charge. He had trusted them to go on. One Christian, in particular, he had trusted his fellow and his master in building. The boy had built at a colonial's cattle-kraal once. His skill had multiplied as he built on at the great church, and now he was a master craftsman. Doggedly he was building up again the rain-ruined bastions. The work was going with a swing, if a slow one. The scent was no longer a cold one. The pack were belling and chiming over it, and they were running with their huntsman out of sight.

'I don't understand this bit of work properly,' Spenser said.
'What's made the dry bones live?'

'Inspiration,' I said reverently. 'Looked at in one way it's Art. Looked at all ways it's Religion. It's the same sort of thing as went on, I suppose, when the faith of sun and moon was a power. Now the faith of Christ is gathering force in the land. The land isn't an Italy, and our twentieth century isn't that old thirteenth century; yet look out for the signs and wonders you spoke of. Likely enough they're to be expected.'

We went to the Pageant Master's lecture on the Mabgwe Ruins that night, when we had