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