of our city.
He fell in with my wishes, and there evolved a picture of a widespread colonization of central and southern Africa by a warlike and energetic people, based on the city of Opet, and ruled by a hereditary king, the ‘Gry-Lion’, and an oligarchy of nine noble families. The decrees of this Council covered a range as wide as the measures adopted for dredging the channels of the lake and preventing the encroachment of water weed, to the choice of messengers to be sent to the Gods Baal and Astarte. Here Astarte seemed to have taken precedence over the more usual Carthaginian form Tanith. ‘Messengers’, we suspected, were human sacrifices.
We discovered carefully recorded family trees, based like the Jewish system on a matrilinear system. Each noble man or woman could trace his or her line back to the founding of the city. It was also clear from the chronicle that their religion was part of their scheme of living, and we could reasonably guess that it was a conventional form of polytheism, with leading male and female godheads, Baal and Astarte.
As we moved forward in time so we found new factors intruding, new contingencies occupying the attention of the ruling king. The rapid shrinking of the waters of the lake of Opet began to threaten the city’s life line, and in the year 296 the Gry-Lion sent 7,000 slaves to assist with the work of keeping the channels open to the sea. He also dispatched a column of 1.000 of his own guards under the war-captain Ramose with orders to ‘venture eastwards towards the rising sun stopping not, nor failing in determination’ until he had reached the eastern sea and had discovered the route to the lands of the north whose existence was postulated by the sea captain and navigator, Habbakuk Lal.
A year later Ramose returns, with only seventy men, the others having perished in a land of pestilential swamps and putrid fevers. He had, however, reached the eastern sea and there found a city of traders and seafarers ‘dark men, and bearded, dressed in fine linens, and binding their brows with the same material’. They come from a land beyond the eastern sea, and Ramose is rewarded with twenty fingers of gold and twenty slaves. Our men of Opet have made their first contact with the Arabs, known to them as ‘the Dravs’, who are colonizing the Sofala coast.
We learned how the Gry-Lion’s search for a new source of slave-labour becomes desperate. Orders are dispatched to the mine overseers to take all measures to prolong the working lives of their slaves. Rations of meat and corn are increased, inflating the cost of production but increasing the life expectancy of the slaves. Owners are enjoined to breed all female slaves regularly, and the practice of infibulation is discontinued. The slaving expeditions are sent farther and farther afield, as the Yuye are hunted down. From the description of these yellow-skinned Yuye we guessed they were the ancestors of Hottentot people.
Then suddenly the Gry-Lion is delighted by the return of a northerly expedition with 500 ‘savage Nubians, both tall and strong’ and the leader of the expedition is rewarded with ten fingers of gold. This delight fades slowly over the following hundred years as a solid mass of black humanity builds up north of the great river. The vast Bantu migrations have begun and now the concern of the Gry-Lion is to dam the flood southwards and his legions march constant patrol upon the northern border.
Our samplings gave us these fleeting glimpses into the past, but they were recorded as bland impersonal statements of fact. How we longed to find the writings of a Pliny or Livy to give flesh and breath to these meticulous records of acquired wealth.
Each fact seemed to present us with a hundred unanswered questions. Of these the most pressing was: where did they come from these men of Opet, and when? Where did they go to and why? We hoped the answers to the major questions were here somewhere in this maze of writings, and in the meantime we occupied ourselves with finding the lesser answers.
It was easy enough to locate the places mentioned in the chronicles, Zimbao and Punt were the southern and northern territories of modern Rhodesia, the great river was the Zambezi, the lakes had disappeared, the gardens of Zeng were clearly the hundreds of thousands of acres of terraced hillsides in the Inyanga area of eastern Rhodesia, the hills of Tuya must be the copper-rich country above Sinoia; step by step we established the presence of our men of Opet at nearly all the ancient sites, and at the same time we had a picture of the building-up of an immense treasure. For although the bulk of this wealth was sent ‘outwards’ yet there re-occurred the words ’a tenth part to the Gry-Lion‘.
Where had this treasure been stored, and what had become of it? Had it perished with the city, or was it still here in some secret storehouse carved from the red rock cliffs of the Hills of Blood?
As a mental exercise I made an estimate of the extent of this treasure. Assuming that a ‘finger’ of gold was one of the finger-like rods of the precious metal we had discovered among the foundations of the city. I listed the total inflow of gold recorded in twenty-odd sample years beginning in the year 345 and ending in the year 501. I found that previous estimates had been hopelessly inadequate. Instead of 750 tons of gold, I found that the total recovery from the ancient mines could not have been less than 4,000 tons - of which a tenth part to the Gry- Lion.
Assuming half of this 400 tons had been spent on the maintenance of his army, the building of the temple and other public works, this still left the staggering figure of 200 tons of gold that might be hidden in or near the city - 200 tons represents a fortune of almost ?80,000,000.
When
‘What should we look for, Lo?’ As if I didn’t know.
‘Well, those old boys were dab hands at hiding things away. They must have been the most secretive people in history, and we still haven’t found their burial grounds.’
‘So you want me to go grave-hunting.’ I grinned at him, and he laughed.
‘Of course, Ben, if you happened to stumble on their treasury I wouldn’t hate you for it. After all eighty Big M’s are a nice piece of petty cash.’
We had transferred 261 jars from the archives to the repository and Eldridge and Sally had sufficient material to keep them busy for the next two or three months, so I decided to follow Louren’s suggestion and suspend work in the archives and undertake another detailed search of the area. My timing was impeccable. Ral was within five feet of where the small jars with the sunbird seals on their lids were standing in the darkest corner of the last recess. They were tucked away behind the front rank of jars twice their size and so effectively hidden by them that we had not included them in our original count. Ral was working his way steadily towards them, another three days would have been enough, but I took him away to search the cliffs.
This was November which we call the ‘suicide month’ in Africa. The sun was a hammer, and the earth an anvil but we worked the cliffs despite it. We rested only for two hours in the middle of the day, when the heat was
