Page:Seven Years in South Africa v2.djvu/478

 wards, whilst on the left it curved inwards towards the centre. Altogether the resemblance between these ruins and those we had seen before on the Shasha was very striking; to my mind they conveyed the impression that the walls might originally have been put up with some reference to the gold that was being found in the locality; but I look for a future visit, in which I may be able to make such investigations as may settle whether they were erected by the Mashonas in the east or by the people of Monopotapa.

Hearing on my return that Pit Jacobs had come home, I called and stayed some hours with him. It could hardly be otherwise than with intense interest that I listened to the recounting of the many episodes in the experience of five-and-twenty years of a man who had acquired the reputation of being the second-best elephant-hunter in all South Africa.

Numerous as lions are in other parts, I never heard of them being so bold as they notoriously are in the neighbourhood of the Tati station. The gold-diggers suffered greatly from their depredations, and they had been known to get mside kraals enclosed by a thorn-fence six feet high, and the same thickness at its base. Brown and Pit Jacobs had often seen them prowling in the night in the space between their houses, and one morning, while the mining operations were going on, a native labourer on entering the coal-cellar to get fuel for the engine, was pounced upon by a lion, that would certainly have torn him to pieces if it had not been that it was old and its teeth blunt. On another occasion a lioness had been shot at midday; and within the last few days Mr. Brown’s horse had been dragged from the