of Solomon's Mines, now a matter of nearly thirty years ago. That was
when I was on my first elephant hunt in the Matalebe country. His name
was Evans, and he was killed the following year, poor fellow, by a
wounded buffalo, and lies buried near the Zambesi Falls. I was telling
Evans one night, I remember, of some wonderful workings I had found
whilst hunting koodoo and eland in what is now the Lydenburg district
of the Transvaal. I see they have come across these workings again
lately in prospecting for gold, but I knew of them years ago. There is
a great wide wagon road cut out of the solid rock, and leading to the
mouth of the working or gallery. Inside the mouth of this gallery are
stacks of gold quartz piled up ready for roasting, which shows that
the workers, whoever they were, must have left in a hurry. Also, about
twenty paces in, the gallery is built across, and a beautiful bit of
masonry it is."

"'Ay,' said Evans, 'but I will spin you a queerer yarn than that'; and
he went on to tell me how he had found in the far interior a ruined
city, which he believed to be the Ophir of the Bible, and, by the way,
other more learned men have said the same long since poor Evans's
time. I was, I remember, listening open-eared to all these wonders,
for I was young at the time, and this story of an ancient civilisation
and of the treasures which those old Jewish or Phoenician adventurers
used to extract from a country long since lapsed into the darkest
barbarism took a great hold upon my imagination, when suddenly he said
to me, 'Lad, did you ever hear of the Suliman Mountains up to the
north-west of the Mushakulumbwe country?' I told him I never had. 'Ah,
well,' he said, 'that is where Solomon really had his mines, his
diamond mines, I mean.'

"'How do you know that?' I asked.