We shan't need to fare so ruggedly after all. A lunch at the
"Apes and Peacocks" Hotel is about the worst of it. But we can
take out a Fortnum and Mason's hamper in the road-car that meets
us.'

So they went to the ruins. Vine, who, as a pioneer had seen the
'Temple's' torso shaggy in bush and long grass, hardly knew it
again. It had been shaven and shorn rather ruthlessly. Some of
the ruins, he noted ungratefully, were numbered to correspond
with a catalogue. There was, moreover, the glamorous sheen of a
wire fence about the whole place.

A curator participated as guide by special arrangement. A local
celebrity accompanied him; he stood for the faith of Ophir, and
smote the Egyptologist adversary not once nor twice alone. He
confessed to the ladies of the party his conviction that the
theory of an African origin was too inconceivably squalid. He
stood for the gorgeous East, he said, as against Kaffirdom. He
would not insult the culture that they brought with them by
bothering them with detailed arguments.

Meanwhile another local celebrity was employed in bossing up some
restoration work. Primitive walls were receiving trained modern
attention, and medical attendance, regardless of expense.

Vine came to me at Umvuma when the Zimbabwe visitation was over
and done. He was seeing his party off by the Salisbury train
when he caught sight of me on the platform. That night he smoked
and slept by an ox-wagon. Bread was to hand in rather frugal
measure, but there was great plenty of monkey-nuts. There was
also bush-tea, and Vine brought much tobacco. We smoked till long
after the moon set, and that was near midnight. He told me of
disappointments that had come to him through his pilgrimage being
over well-appointed.

'After all,' I said, 'you might try again next year.'

'But a year's a lot at my age. I was forty-five last month, and I
don't mean coming out again.

'So little done, so much to do, So many worlds, such things to
be.'

'Where shall we go to this week?' he went on. 'I've got a week
off from the Cook's combination. You'll give me the one week,
won't you Shall we go to Dhlo-Dhlo or Nanatali or Sinoia Caves?
It's the curse of our Cook's tour that it's mopped up the sacred
places I did want to see in a decent way the Grave, and the
Temple, and the Falls.'

'Yours is the very snobbery of pilgrimage,' I told him sternly.
'There are surely shrines on the veld that have never yet got
into a Chartered Compa