ften lived and
in which the remains rested for the night on the final journey. You pass
from the green low-lands to the bare frontiers of the rocky domain where
the Matabeles fled after the second war and where the Father of Rhodesia
held his historic parleys with them.
Soon the way becomes so difficult that you must leave the motor and
continue on foot. The Matopos are a wild and desolate range. It is not
until you are well beyond the granite outposts that there bursts upon
you an immense open area,--a sort of amphitheatre in which the Druids
might have held their weird ritual. Directly ahead you see a battlement
of boulders projected by some immemorial upheaval. Intrenched between
them is the spot where Rhodes rests and which is marked by a brass plate
bearing the words: "Here Lie the Remains of Cecil John Rhodes." In his
will he directed that the site be chosen and even wrote the simple
inscription for the cover.
When you stand on this eminence and look out on the grim, brooding
landscape, you not only realize why Rhodes called it "The View of the
World," but you also understand why he elected to sleep here. The
loneliness and grandeur of the environment, with its absence of any sign
of human life and habitation, convey that sense of aloofness which, in a
man like Rhodes, is the inevitable penalty that true greatness exacts.
The ages seem to be keeping vigil with his spirit.
For eighteen years Rhodes slept here in solitary state. In 1920 the
remains of Dr. Jameson were placed in a grave hewn out of the rock and
located about one hundred feet from the spot where his old friend rests.
It is peculiarly fitting that these two men who played such heroic part
in the rise of Rhodesia should repose within a stone's throw of each
other.
During these last years I have seen some of the great things. They
included the British Grand Fleet in battle array, Russia at the daybreak
of democracy, the long travail of Verdun and the Somme, the first
American flag on the battlefields of France, Armistice Day amid the
tragedy of war, and all the rest of the panorama that those momentous
days disclosed. But nothing perhaps was more moving than the silence and
majesty that invested the grave of Cecil Rhodes. Instinctively there
came to my mind the lines about him that Kipling wrote in "The Burial":
It is his will that he look forth
Across the world he won--
The granite of the ancient North--
G
|