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By Root 3351 0

of ships at Kilwa and Sofala, the grand mystery of the oceanhe could never again be satisfied with his father's village and its naked men plotting to snare a rhinoceros. His commitment lay with the city, not to any grandiose concept of its destiny but to the honorable task of doing better whatever limited assignment he was given. He would supervise his mines with extra attention and trade their gold to maximum advantage. He would work to strengthen Zimbabwe and help it maintain itself against the new hegemonies forming along the Zambezi. To undertake such tasks would mean that he could never go south to claim Zeolani, and as night faded, the moon sinking into the western sea seemed like the slow vanishing of that beautiful girl. At the moment when the golden disk plunged into the waves it looked much like the Nepalese disk he had sent her, and he could think only of their love-making and of the sorrow that would never completely leave him.

At dawn he sought his Arab mentor and said, 'I must buy one special thing ... to send south ... to a girl in my village.'

'You will not take it to her yourself?'

'Never.'

'Then make it something precious, for long remembrance,' and the Arab put before him a selection of items, and from them Nxumalo started to choose his gift, but as he looked past the trinkets he saw the slaves, chained forever to their benches, and he was in confusion.

When Nxumalo led his porters back to Zimbabwe at the close of 1459, he brought with him goods from distant lands and much intelligence regarding developments on the Zambezi, where Sena and Tete were becoming important trading towns. He brought rumors of areas farther up the river where salt was available and the land not exhausted. And he secreted in his bundle a jade necklace from China, which he sent south with the Old Seeker on the trip which that fellow again averred was his last.

For many days he met in the citadel with the king and the Mhondoro, discussing the Zambezi developments. He reported on all that the Arabs had told him, and he started an impassioned description of what steps must be taken to protect and augment Zimbabwe, but he did not get far, because the king cut him short with an astonishing statement: 'We have decided to abandon this city.'

Nxumalo gasped. 'But it's a noble city,' he pleaded. 'Even better than Kilwa.'

'It was. It is. But it can no longer be.' The king was adamant in his decision that Great Zimbabwe, as it was called then and forever, must be surrendered to the jungle, since further occupancy was impractical.

As he reiterated this doleful verdict the three men looked down upon the fairest city south of Egypt, a subtle combination of granite-walled enclosures and adobe rondavels, a city in which eleven thousand workers enjoyed a good and differentiated life. It was a place of constant peace, of great enrichment for the few and modest well-being for all; its faults were that it had spent its energy searching for gold, its resultant income on ostentation. It had ignored clear signs that the press of people in the capital city had impaired the environment; the delicate balance between man and nature which had endured for so long was upset. Its economic stability and assured gold had pleased distant Arabs and Indian princes, but as its natural resources dwindled, its existence was doomed. Those long lines of slaves carrying in precious goods had done nothing to nourish the real city, so at the very apex of its glory it had to be abandoned.

On no one did the decision fall with harsher force than on Nxumalo, for on the dhow that night he had committed himself to the perpetuation of this city, yet on the day he returned to put his promise into action he was informed that the city would no longer exist. For two weeks he was disconsolate, and then it occurred to him that a worthy man dedicates himself not to one particular thing which attracts him, but to all tasks; and he vowed that when the time came to move this city to its new site, he would devote all his powers to that endeavor and, with Hlenga's help, make the new