The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba Read Online Free PDF Page A

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