Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/369

 many acres, along a river in which there is only stagnant water. Some of the more extensive buildings seem to have been used for defense. These are of stone, without mortar, and hundreds of feet of the walls are in as good condition as they ever were. There are great cisterns for holding water and grain, and modern builders say the cement was probably made on the ground, by a process of which they have no knowledge. Some of the cisterns, if cleaned out, would probably hold water today. Many relics have been picked up about the place, which may be seen in a museum at Bulawayo, and these indicate that the inhabitants were nearly as far advanced as the ancient Egyptians; they were able to smelt metals, and they had various kinds of domestic utensils, pottery, implements of war, etc. The people of Khami knew something of dentistry, of medicine, and of astronomy. Five hundred ruins or vestiges of former buildings are found in Rhodesia, extending over an area 800 by 700 miles, and all these are undoubtedly much older than Columbus, and probably older than Christ Recently ruins have been found in Thibet very much older than the ruins in Egypt, and, as investigations are more carefully made, the fact becomes more apparent that no one has yet been able to realize how old the world actually is In going to the Khami ruins, we passed hundreds of negro women walking into Bulawayo and carrying vegetables, chickens, firewood, etc. They were all naked above the waist, and invariably carried their loads on their heads; one woman carried a watermelon in this unusual way. The chickens were carried in rough home-made baskets.*