The Stone Bird

by H. Rider Haggard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I keep a store in Pietermaritzburg, on the corner of Longmarket Street, where I sell wagon-grease, Boer tobacco, blankets, powder and shot, and anything else that a man may want who is going somewhere I have already been. My left leg was spoilt by a buffalo on the Umfolosi in the year '79, and since then I have done my travelling across the counter, which is safer, and pays better, though I do not like it so well.

It was in the April of 1891 that the young gentleman came in. I knew what he was before he opened his mouth, for he had on a new cord suit, a new hat with a puggaree to it such as they sell in the Strand to men going to India, and a new rifle in a case that had never been rained upon. He was perhaps nineteen, tall and pink, with that look about the eyes which a boy has when he has been dreaming of one thing for a long while and has at last come to the place where it is supposed to begin.

"Are you Mr. Wace?" he asked. "Mr. Jonas Wace, the hunter?"

I said that I was Jonas Wace, and that I had been a hunter, and that if he wanted a hunter now he had better look elsewhere, for I could not walk to the end of the street without a stick.

He said his name was Arthur Pellew, from Launceston in Cornwall, and that a man at the hotel had told him I had been north of the Limpopo before there were any roads there; and that I had seen the old ruins in the Banyai country, which the Company's people were now calling the Zimbabwe. Then he put a book down upon my counter, between the scale and the jar of fish-hooks, and laid his hand flat upon it as a parson does upon the Bible.

I will not say what book it was, for the man who wrote it is still living and has done well by it. It was one of those romances about a road to a lost treasure in the interior, with a map in the front, and a great deal of fighting, and a black king restored to his throne by three Englishmen. I had read it myself, in the evenings, the winter after it came out. I found it very good reading. Most of what the author said about the natives was true, as far as it went, and the rest of it was very good reading.

"I have come to find a place like that," said Mr. Pellew, and coloured up, as though he had confessed to being in love.

Now in the corner by the stove, on a box of Martini cartridges, sat old Nyoni, smoking. He has been with me since the year '68, when he came to me a lad from the Tugela with nothing but a blanket and two sticks, and he has followed me ever since, first after elephant, and now, as he says, after the money-box, which is a beast that runs very slowly but never lies down. Nyoni understands English better than he lets the white men see. He took his pipe out of his mouth, looked at the book, looked at the boy, and put the pipe back again. I knew that look. I have seen him give it to a lion that walked off without charging.

"Mr. Pellew," I said, "I will tell you about the walls, because you have asked me, and because it is a slack morning. Afterwards you shall buy what you please. Sit down on the meal-bag. It is clean."

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It was in the year 1873. I was thirty, and had shot elephant for six seasons, and had nothing to show for it but a wagon, a span of salted oxen, and a good name among the Dutch for paying my debts. That winter a gentleman named Mr. Edward Coplestone hired me at Potchefstroom. He was an Oxford man with a great deal of money and a long thin neck, and he carried in his saddle-bag a German paper in which a traveller called Mauch had written that he had found, far to the north-east, stone walls of so great an age and size that they could only be the work of the Queen of Sheba, and that this was the land of Ophir, whence Solomon had his gold.

Mr. Coplestone had read this paper until it was soft as wash-leather. He used to read pieces of it to me at night by the fire, translating as he went, and his voice would shake a little. I did not believe in the Queen of Sheba, but I believed in his money, and also I had heard that there was ivory in the low country beyond the Lundi, where few men had hunted. So we went.

I will not weary you with the journey. You have a map in your book, and mine was much the same, except that on mine the bad water was marked. We went up through the Zoutpansberg, where the Knobnoses live, and crossed the Limpopo in August when it was low, and then we were in the fly country, and the oxen began to die. We left the wagon at the edge of the fly with two of the boys, and went on foot: Mr. Coplestone, myself, Nyoni, and eight carriers we had hired from a chief in the mountains. Mr. Coplestone walked very well for a man with such a neck. He did not complain of anything except that we went too slowly, and at night he wrote in a book with a brass lock, by the light of a candle in a bottle.

We found the place on the nineteenth day after leaving the wagon. A man of the Makalanga, who had been taken as a boy in a Matabele raid and had lived among them long enough to speak a sort of Zulu, came out of the bush and offered to guide us, for a knife. Nyoni talked with him for a long while before he would let me give him the knife. Afterwards Nyoni said to me—he called me Mehlomane, which means Four Eyes, because I wore spectacles to read—"This one is honest, Mehlomane. He wants the knife more than he wants to cheat us. That is the best kind of honesty there is."

The guide's name was Mapfumo, or something like it, and he brought us over a ridge of granite in the late afternoon, and there it was.

Mr. Pellew, I have seen a good many sights. I have seen the Victoria Falls from the Zambesi in flood, and twenty thousand Zulus in the Royal kraal at Ulundi, and I do not think I was ever so taken aback as I was by those walls. They lay in a valley, under a great hill of tumbled granite, and they were built of small stones, dressed and fitted without any mortar, course upon course, so that the face of them was as smooth as the side of a ship. The great wall that runs round the lower enclosure was higher than four men, one standing upon another, and thick enough at the base for a wagon to drive along the top, if a wagon could have got there. There was a pattern built into the top courses, like the chevrons on a sergeant's arm. There were trees growing out of the walls, fig trees, whose roots had split the stones apart, and that was how one knew they were old.

Mr. Coplestone stood upon the ridge and did not say anything for a long time. Then he took off his hat. I thought he was going to pray. Instead he said, quite quietly, "Wace, I am the first Englishman who has ever stood here," and I did not tell him about the German, because, after all, the German was not an Englishman.

We camped by a stream below the hill, and for eleven days Mr. Coplestone measured.

He had a chain, and a compass, and a tape of a hundred feet, and he made Nyoni and me hold the ends of these things while he walked about in the passages between the walls, calling out figures, and writing them in the book with the brass lock. I have never worked so hard for any elephant. He measured the great wall and the little walls and the doorways and the steps. He measured a tall round tower of solid stone that stood in the big enclosure, with no door to it and no room inside it, which he said was a temple to Baal, and which the Makalanga said was not anything at all, but only had always been there. He measured the passages that wind about in the hill above, among the boulders, where the walls are built from one boulder to the next so cleverly that you cannot tell at first where the rock stops and the building begins.

And every night he read me out of the German paper, and told me which of the walls were Phoenician and which were Sabaean, and how the Queen had come up from the coast with her camels to fetch the gold, and how the savage natives of the country, who had come afterwards, had let it all fall into ruin, having no notion how such a thing was done.

Now I must tell you about the natives of the country, because you will not find them in your book.

There was a kraal of the Makalanga about a mile off, under the hill. They were a quiet, timid people, much harried by the Matabele, who raided them for cattle and children whenever the young men of Lobengula's regiments wanted practice; so they kept close to their rocks, and built their huts among the boulders where an impi could not easily come at them. And what struck me, though I did not think much of it at the time, was that they had built walls too. Not great walls. Little ones, of rough stones piled without mortar, closing the gaps between the rocks, round their cattle-pens and their huts. They built them in the same fashion as the old walls, course upon course, with the stones laid flat, though not dressed so carefully. One evening I watched a man mending one where a cow had pushed it over. He did it very quickly, without looking, as a man ties a knot he has tied all his life.

I mentioned this to Mr. Coplestone, and he said that it was a very interesting example of the imitative faculty in the lower races, and he wrote it down.

The headman of the kraal came to see us on the third day, and on most days after that. He was an old man, very thin, with a leopard skin and a stick with a carved head, and he would sit for an hour at a time on a stone by our fire, watching Mr. Coplestone write. Nyoni talked with him through Mapfumo, and they got on very well, Nyoni being one who can sit without talking as well as with it, which most white men cannot.

On the seventh night Nyoni came to me when Mr. Coplestone was asleep, and squatted down by my blanket, and said, "Mehlomane, the old man says that the white man is measuring his grandfathers' houses."

I asked him what he meant.

"He says that his father's father's fathers lived up there, on the hill, and down there in the big wall, when they were many and had chiefs who were very rich in cattle, before the people fell apart and the chiefs went away. He says that the round tower is a thing their chiefs had, and that up in the hill is a place where they still go to speak to those grandfathers, and that his people do not like the white man walking in it with a chain."

"Did you tell him the white man thinks a queen from over the sea built it?"

Nyoni was quiet for a little. Then he said, "I told him. He laughed. He asked me what this queen ate, while she built it, and where she kept her cattle, and why she did not take her houses away with her when she went."

I lay awake some while thinking about this, and in the morning I told Mr. Coplestone, as near as I could, what the old man had said.

He was shaving at the time, with a little mirror propped in the fork of a tree. He heard me out, and then he said, "My dear Wace, every savage in Africa will tell you that his grandfathers built whatever is standing near his kraal. It is a point of pride with them. These people cannot build a hut that keeps the rain out. Look at them." And he went on shaving.

Well, I looked at them. I have been looking at them, one way and another, these four-and-twenty years. The huts kept the rain out very well. But I was being paid by the day, and I did not argue.

On the ninth day Mr. Coplestone found the birds.

They were up on the hill, in an enclosure among the boulders, where the old headman had asked us not to go. There were several of them, I do not remember how many, each set upon the top of a stone pillar about as high as a man's chest: birds carved out of a soft greenish stone, something like a hawk and something like nothing I had ever seen, sitting very upright with their wings folded, and looking out over the valley as though they were waiting for somebody to come back. They were the strangest things I ever saw in Africa, and I have seen a good many strange things. Nyoni would not go into that place. He stood at the gap in the wall and would not come further, and he had never, in five years, refused to follow me anywhere, not even into the reeds after a wounded buffalo.

Mr. Coplestone was beside himself. He said they were the bird of Astarte, and that they proved everything. He sat down before them and drew them in his book, all of them, with great care; and then he said that he must take one home, for nobody at Oxford would believe him else.

I said that I thought the people of the kraal would not like it.

He said that the people of the kraal had no more notion what the birds were than the cows had, and that if they were left there they would certainly be broken, or burnt for lime, and that in the Ashmolean they would be safe for ever. And I am bound to tell you, Mr. Pellew, that I half believed him, for it sounded very reasonable, and he was paying for the expedition.

The bird and its pillar were cut from one stone, and too heavy to carry. So Mr. Coplestone took my hand-axe and struck it off at the neck of the pillar, where the stone was thinnest. It took him a good many blows. I can hear them now: a dull sound, like a man splitting green wood. When it came away he wrapped it in his flannel shirt and carried it down himself.

The old headman did not come to our fire again. Next morning the carriers would not take up their loads until I had doubled their pay, and Mapfumo had gone in the night, with his knife. We started south on the twelfth day, Mr. Coplestone carrying the bird in a canvas bag on his own back, for he would trust it to nobody.

On the sixth day from the walls, in the low country by the Lundi, he took the fever.

I have nursed a good many men through the fever and buried a good many who did not come through it, and I will not describe it to you, because you will very likely find out for yourself. He had it badly. I dosed him with quinine until his ears rang and he could not hear me, and we carried him in a blanket slung on a pole, and on the fourth night he was talking all the time. He talked about Solomon's gold, and about a girl in Oxford whose name was Alice, and about the birds. He thought the birds were sitting in the trees around the camp, watching him. He asked me several times to make them go away. Then towards morning he was quiet, and when it was light I found that he was dead.

We buried him under a big wild-fig by the river, and built the grave up with stones against the hyenas. Nyoni built it. He made a very good wall of it, course upon course, laid flat, without any mortar.

That night I put the canvas bag with the bird in it beside my own blanket, meaning to carry it to the coast and send it to Mr. Coplestone's people with his book and his watch. In the morning the bag was there, but the bird was not.

I asked the carriers. They knew nothing. I asked Nyoni. He was rolling up his blanket, and he did not stop rolling it. He said, "Perhaps it flew, Mehlomane."

I looked at him for some time. Then I said, "Perhaps it did," and we went on south to the wagon.

---

That was the end of the story, and I stopped, and lit my pipe, which had gone out.

Mr. Pellew had sat very still all through it, upon the meal-bag. Now he let out his breath, and said, "And where is it now? The bird?"

"Ask him," said I.

Mr. Pellew turned round upon the box of cartridges, and Nyoni looked at him over the bowl of his pipe, with his old eyes half shut, as he looks at the oxen in the sale-yard. He said nothing at all, in English or in Zulu. Presently Mr. Pellew turned back to me, rather red.

"But you see," he said, "the walls are still there. The Company has a fort near them now, Fort Victoria; there is a road. Mr. Bent is going up this year to dig. Everyone says they were built by the Phoenicians."

"So I have heard," said I.

"And there may be gold. There must be. Why else would anyone have built such a place there, unless there was gold?"

I did not answer him, because there was no answer to give that he would have heard. He had come seven thousand miles with that book in his box. He had read it, I dare say, in a bedroom in Launceston with the rain on the window, and by the time he finished it he had already seen the walls, and the birds, and the treasure, and the black king who would be grateful, before ever he left Plymouth. A man does not cross the sea to find out that he was wrong. He crosses it to find what he has already read about.

So I did the only useful thing I could do. I sold him what he needed. Not what he had come in wanting, which was a great deal of ammunition and a sjambok with a silver ferrule, but what he needed: two good blankets, a kettle, quinine enough for a regiment, a water-bag, and a pair of veldschoens to wear instead of the boots from the Strand, which would have crippled him in a week. He paid me eleven pounds four shillings and sixpence. It is a strange trade I have come to, but it is a trade.

Then, because he was going anyway, I took his book from the counter, and opened it to the front, where the map was, and the printed dedication to all the big and little boys who should read it. On the blank page facing it I wrote out, in pencil, everything I could remember that would keep him alive between the Limpopo and the walls: the rivers that run dry in September, the good water at the foot of the second range, the months of the fever in the low country, the kraals where they would sell him meal, and the name of the old headman, if he was still living, and that he should go to him first, and ask his leave, and not walk in the place on the hill.

When I had done there was no room left upon the page. I blotted it, and closed the book, and gave it back to him.

He thanked me very warmly, and shook my hand, and went out into Longmarket Street with his kettle under one arm and the book under the other, and I watched him through the window until the wagons hid him.

Nyoni knocked out his pipe against the stove.

"He will go and look for the queen," he said in Zulu.

"Yes," said I.

"Then he will need the quinine," said Nyoni, and went out into the yard to see to the oxen.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Īdūs Octōbrēs (11 October 2026), ab Henrīcō Rider Haggard per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

H. Rider Haggard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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