The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba Read online

  At the end of that summer on their way out of Matabeleland, Mauch came upon another promising reef in the southern Tati area and the party hurried home to plan an expedition to exploit these more accessible Tati lodes. Negotiations were opened with Lobengula who had that year succeeded his father, Msilikaze, and in December news of the gold ‘broke’ in the Transvaal Argus, soon to be followed by wildly exaggerated claims in the British press, one of which was entitled ‘To Ophir Direct’. But Mauch kept to himself information, indeed an introduction, to an even more exotic secret.

  We know that he visited his fellow-national, Pastor Merensky, at the Berlin Mission on his way through the Soutspanberg. It was either on this visit or on another trip a year later, Merensky told Mauch that the ancient gold mines were the work of a lost civilisation and, according to Merensky’s native sources, they had left behind a monumental temple-city ruined and overgrown in the Shona jungle. Merensky also revealed that he had already passed on this story to an earlier adventurer, an American sailor, Adam Renders, of whom nothing had been heard since. If Mauch could find Adam Renders, or any evidence of his passage, he might also find the lost city. Merensky knew his Bible. He wanted his fellow countryman to be the first to discover King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’s lost city of Ophir.

  Rhodes, meanwhile, had been spending time at Oxford University getting a degree, and he read all of the newspaper accounts – especially ‘To Ophir Direct’ – with undisguised excitement. In Africa, however, there were more pressing affairs, not least the takeover bid which would make or break him. Rhodes had determined to buy out the entire Kimberley diamond field. Just one powerful entrepreneur, Barney Barnato, still stood in his way. By 1888 Rhodes had in effect ‘cornered’ the world’s diamond market but there was still a fight over the terms of the trust deed for the new company, De Beers Consolidated Mines. Barnato had insisted on a company limited to diamond mining, but that was far too confining for Rhodes who had announced to friends that he wanted to use the De Beers company as his instrument for ‘winning the north’. There was a final all-night meeting at the end of which an exhausted Barney Barnato conceded defeat with the comment: ‘Some people have a fancy for one thing and some for another. You have a fancy for making an empire. Well I suppose I must give it to you.’ As a result the mighty De Beers conglomerate has the right not only to mine diamonds and other minerals, but to conduct banking operations, build railways, annex and govern territory – and even raise an army. All this, as we shall see in a moment, can be traced back to the outcome of the conversation Carl Mauch had with Pastor Merensky.

  In this interval the Boers had added to everyone’s fears of an Afrikaner–German axis across middle Africa by first allowing the establishment of two ‘freebooter’ pocket republics, Stellaland and Goshen, and then annexing them into their South African republic. The British responded by declaring their ‘protection’ over the southern approaches to Matabeleland and installing a British commissioner there. When the Boer annexation took place under the eyes of this commissioner, 4,000 British troops marched north into what would in future be known as the Bechuanaland Protectorate and eliminated Goshen and Stellaland. For the moment the threat of further anti-British territorial gains which would block the road to Ophir was over.

  That still left the Boers with unrestricted access to the north and the Boers were as ever restless, their young men agitating for the right to open up more land for farming. To the east all the political activity had also reignited Portuguese interest in the land of the Mashonas. Basing their case on century-old precedents and treaties they claimed to have with Shona and Manica chiefs they reinstated the Shona hinterland as their sphere of influence.

  Frederick Courtenay Selous, the hunter-politician who will feature large in our story, sought to secure the Shona eldorado for himself by recognising the Portuguese claims and obtaining a gold-mining concession from them.

  The British denied all such claims but they did acknowledge that a race between three European powers – Britain, Germany and Portugal, as well as the Boers – was under way and they began to call on their agents, missionaries like Moffat and Livingstone, hunter-explorers like Selous and businessmen like Rhodes, for information about this alleged Ophir. Was it worth the expense and perhaps the risk of war? Carl Mauch’s description of the place which had been published years before in an obscure German journal were dusted off and re-examined. His conclusions of origin had been derided as amateur romanticism by antiquarians of the time (archaeology was still a science in its infancy) but leaving aside Mauch’s exotic claim that he had actually discovered the Queen of Sheba’s summer palace, what else had he revealed?

  Merensky had warned Mauch that the journey would be both difficult and dangerous. He confessed that he had already tried to reach the ‘ancient Ophir of Solomon’ himself but had not pushed on to any ruins because of a notorious tribe called ‘Makwapa’ who robbed and murdered whites for their valuable possessions. Merensky later recorded: ‘A guide of the Banyai tribe told us much about this mysterious spot (the temple-ruins), and thus we gathered that the Banyai revere these ancient buildings; that no living creature may there be put to death, no tree destroyed, since everything is considered sacred. He told us that a populous black tribe, acquainted with the use of firearms, had formerly dwelt there, but about fifty years before had gone northwards. We heard many details regarding the form and structure of these ancient piles, and the inscriptions they bore, but I cannot answer for their truth.’

  Mauch, however, was tougher, younger and more intrepid. He also had established credentials with the Matabele as a hunter. Nonetheless, as his journal reveals, it would take him four months, from May until the end of August 1871, to reach ‘the most valuable and important and hitherto most mysterious part of Africa … the old Monomotapa or Ophir’. Deep in Shona country he also found Adam Renders, of whom he was somewhat contemptuous because Renders had ‘gone native’, taking two wives, the daughters of a Shona chief. This might have offended Mauch’s morality but it proved diplomatically useful because after much prevarication on the part of suspicious local people, Mauch was taken by Renders to ‘quite large ruins which could never have been built by blacks’.

  Mauch hung on in Mashonaland for nine months, his relations with the natives progressing from bad to worse until in the end he was only allowed to visit the ruins three times. His plight is reported in a note he sent to a hunter friend, George Phillips, in October. Mauch had not even dared to sign the note for fear of revealing where he was to the Matabele, but he identified himself to Phillips by reminding his friend of an incident they had had with lions. Mauch confirmed that he was living with a man named Renders, was in a bad way, having been robbed of everything except his papers and a gun, and needed help. He reminded Phillips not to bring any Matabele. Phillips went to his rescue and also met Renders.

  Phillips’ report confirms that Renders was an American and he had been living near the lost city for three years. It should be noted in passing that if there is to be credit for the ‘discovery’ of the ruins, which would become known as Great Zimbabwe, it should go to Adam Renders, especially as nothing is heard of him ever again. Renders was living with Mauch, Phillips stated, on a stone hill a few miles southwest of the lost city. It was a pretty place: a waterfall coming down from the ridges above which fell into a pan by their hut, to re-emerge as a gushing fountain several hundred feet below. The river had eroded a cave nearby and Mauch told Phillips that he and Renders regularly had to hide there with their Shona hosts to avoid Matabele raiding parties.

  It is from George Phillips’ account of this rescue mission that we get our first hint that Great Zimbabwe might be just one of many lost city complexes. When Mauch takes Phillips to see ‘Ophir’, Phillips comments on a zigzag pattern on the walls similar to a ruined wall he had seen while hunting in the western mountains. He had also heard of decorated walls in the south close to the Tati gold workings in Matabeleland.

  Phillips reprovis
ioned Mauch, who was then able to make two more visits to Great Zimbabwe. Mauch wrote the first detailed descriptions and drew remarkably accurate plans and sketches. It was no easy task. Apart from the hostility of the locals the entire complex was overgrown with giant stinging plants. Massive ancient trees grew through some of the larger walls. Not a single building was in a state of repair or occupied. ‘It was a very sombre environment’, Mauch wrote. ‘Masses of rubble, parts of walls, dense thickets and big trees.’ But he hacked his way through them and was rewarded with a sight no European had seen before, a massive stone wall of immaculate construction with a decorated top. It left him in no doubt that he had finally discovered the ‘rondavel’ of the Queen of Sheba.

  That was, of course, an enormous conclusion to jump to but it should be remembered that in those days the Bible was gospel, not a book of apocryphal stories. The consensus of opinion of the time, expert and romantic, was that Ophir was in Africa. It was perfectly reasonable, having already found the gold mines on which the existence of Ophir hinged, for Mauch to conclude that he had now found the temple Sheba is said by the Bible to have built at Ophir, especially as nothing of this magnitude had ever been found in ‘darkest’ Africa before. Even more so because the local people living in its shadow laid no claim to the ruin and told Mauch ‘the walls were built at a time when the stones were still very soft, otherwise it would have been impossible for the whites who built the walls to form them into a square shape’. Mauch also interviewed an elderly African who described religious ceremonies, including sacrifice, which had been conducted in the ruins by his father.

  Mauch now packed his meagre belongings and hurried south, compiling from his diaries two articles which would eventually be published in German in the Geographischen Mittheilungen in 1874.

  Mauch wrote:

  The ruins may be divided into two parts. The one upon a rocky granite eminence of 400 feet in height, the other upon a somewhat elevated terrace. The two are separated by a gentle valley, their distance apart being about 300 yards. The rocky bluff consists of an elongated mass of granite, rounded in form, upon which stands a second block, and upon this again fragments small, but still many tons in weight, with fissures, chasms and cavities.

  The western side of the mountain is covered from top to bottom by the ruins. As they are for the most part fallen in and covered with rubbish, it is at present impossible to determine the purpose the buildings were intended to serve; the most probable is that it was a fortress in those times, and thus the many passages – now, however, walled up – and the circular or zigzag plan of the walls would also indicate.

  All the walls without exception, are built without mortar, of hewn granite, more or less about the size of our bricks. Best preserved of all is the outer wall of an erection of rounded forms, situated in the plain, and about 150 yards in diameter. It is at a distance of about 600 yards from the mountain, and was probably connected with it by means of great outworks, as appears to be indicated by the mounds of rubbish remaining.

  Inside, everything excepting a tower nearly 30 feet in height, and in perfect preservation, is fallen to ruins, but this at least can be made out; that the narrow passageways are disposed in the form of a labyrinth.

  The tower consists of similar blocks of hewn granite, and is cylindrical to a height of 10 feet, then upwards to the top conical in form. At the foot its diameter is 15 feet, at the top 8 feet.

  It stands between the outer wall and another close to and parallel with it. This entrance has, up to the height of a man, four double layers of quite black stone, alternating with double tiers of granite. The outer walls show an attempt at ornamenting the granite – it represents a double line of zigzags between horizontal bands. The ornament is 20 feet from the ground, and is employed upon a third part of the south wall on each side of the tower and only on the inside.

  Remembering Merensky’s notes, Mauch then looked for ‘inscriptions’, finding none, a problem which has bothered origin theorists ever since. He did, however, unearth a soapstone beam protruding from a wall, a soapstone dish lying underneath a large walled-up boulder close to the Eastern Enclosure and, near the Elliptical Building, an iron object which ‘was a complete mystery to me, but it proves most clearly that a civilised nation must once have lived here’. He sketched this object – it is an iron ‘gong’ of which several others would be found at Great Zimbabwe. Mauch’s critics have, of course, derided this ‘civilised nation’ conclusion but others have shown that the gongs were most likely imported objects, perhaps trade goods. Others very like them have been found in various parts of Africa.

  For Mauch, his most exciting find came on his last day when he revealed the collapsed wooden lintels of the doorways of the Elliptical Building, noting that the wood had not been eaten by insects, was reddish in colour and slightly scented. It was similar to the cedar wood of his pencil. Mauch instantly embroidered a whole theory of Solomon and Sheba around this wood, for which he has been much ridiculed; indeed, it can be said that it was what Mauch made of this wood that has resulted in all his theories about the ruins being scorned as romantic nonsense. Nonetheless, discoveries since have made many of Mauch’s observations worth reviewing.

  ‘It can be taken as fact that the wood which we obtained actually is cedar-wood and from this that it cannot come from anywhere else but the Lebanon,’ Mauch affirmed. ‘Furthermore only the Phoenicians could have brought it here; further Solomon used a lot of cedar-wood for the building of the temple and his palaces; further, including here the visit of the Queen of Sheba and, considering Zimbabwe or Zimbaoe, or Simbaoe written in Arabic (of Hebrew I understand nothing), one gets as a result that the great woman who built the rondeau could have been none other than the Queen of Sheba.’

  Obviously these connections are very tenuous. As Mauch’s critics have pointed out, for Solomon to have brought cedar-wood to Zimbabwe would have been Biblical coals to Newcastle. Mauch’s theory also suffered another mauling when it was demonstrated that an indigenous Zimbabwe tree spirostachys africana has all the properties he describes.

  Back in the 1880s, however, Mauch’s reports set many imaginations alight, not least that of Cecil John Rhodes. What Rhodes wanted was proof positive that this was Ophir, material evidence which would transcend speculation. He began collecting every Zimbabwe artefact he could lay his hands on, starting with the items Mauch found.

  The object which would delight his heart and, in my view, change the course of his life and arguably result in his early death, was at that moment travelling south through Matabeleland concealed in the baggage of a hunter, Willie Posselt, who had retraced Mauch’s footsteps. In 1889, Posselt went looking not for ancient ruins but for ‘King Solomon’s mines’ as described by Mauch, and he had the luck to hire a native guide who promised him stone images of a king and queen. These had to be of Solomon and Sheba, Posselt naturally concluded. The guide took him to a group of simple huts on a stone kopje where he was introduced to the chief. This chief, whose name was actually Mugabe (no relation to the present incumbent), ruled over the valley containing Mauch’s ruins. Adam Renders is nowhere in evidence. Posselt was also told that the ruins had last been occupied by a tribe called the Barozvi who practised sacrificial rites, and that the area was still regarded as sacred by the local people.

  Chief Mugabe was very reluctant to let Posselt enter the valley but the hunter was well armed and well endowed with trade goods. Posselt also had an armed Swahili bodyguard, Klass, who helped with the persuading. On this occasion, however, Posselt found nothing of interest in the valley ruins, certainly no statues of King Solomon and Sheba and he gave up and went back to hunting. On his way back, however, curiosity got the better of him and without seeking the chief’s permission he climbed to the hilltop fortress that Mauch had labelled ‘the Acropolis’, a place which had been banned to Europeans heretofore.

  The reason for that was immediately obvious. Posselt had trespassed on the most sacred site at Great Zimbabwe. In the centre of
an enclosure around what most experts agree was an altar he found four soapstone birds carved on the tops of tall columns or stelae. These enigmatic birds, each exquisitely and individually shaped, decorated with chevron patterns, studding and attendant animals, faced east towards the rising sun. Posselt records:

  Each one, including its plinth, had been hewn out of a solid block of stone and measured 4 feet 6 inches in height; and each was set firmly into the ground. There was also a stone shaped like a millstone and about 18 inches in diameter, with a number of figures carved on the border.

  I selected the best specimen of the bird stones, the beaks of the remainder being damaged, and decided to dig it out. But while doing so, Andizibi [a relative of Chief Mugabe whose village was on the same hill] and his followers became very excited and rushed around with their guns and assegais. I fully expected them to attack us. However, I went on with my work but told Klass, who had loaded two rifles, to shoot the first man he saw aiming at either of us.

  Posselt paid Andizibi with blankets ‘and some other articles’. For this he got the one stone bird and the perforated stone. The bird on its pedestal was too heavy to carry, so he hacked it off! The other stone birds he hid, ‘it being my intention to return at a future date and secure them from the natives’.

  Word reached Cecil Rhodes of Posselt’s successful treasure hunt and that he had brought back to South Africa ‘some wonderful stones from a visit to King Solomon’s Temple’, and he arranged to buy one from Posselt, the first stone bird known to have been looted from the lost city. Rhodes was undoubtedly mesmerised by the bird; indeed, it became a kind of talisman for him. It is still in the bedroom of his house, Groote Schuur, in Cape Town – now the home of the State President – where last year I was allowed to handle it for the purpose of photography. Alta Kriel, the Curator of the Rhodes Collection, told me that Rhodes refused to have it kept anywhere else and it is rumoured that he preferred to be in its presence when making major decisions, of which the most major was, without question, the decision to acquire the country where the stone birds ruled and have its name changed to his own. This bird indubitably changed the course of African history and half a century later, my own.