He used to borrow books from the missionaries, and he must have spent half his salary in buying new ones.
To-night as he sat and puffed in his armchair, he was full of stories about a fellow called Monomotapa.

It seems he was a great black emperor whom the Portuguese discovered about the sixteenth century.

He lived to the north in Mashonaland, and had a mountain full of gold.
The Portuguese did not make much of him, but they got his son and turned him into a priest.
I told Wardlaw that he was most likely only a petty chief, whose exploits were magnified by distance, the same as the caciques in Mexico.

But the schoolmaster would not accept this.
'He must have been a big man, Davie.

You know that the old ruins in Rhodesia, called Zimbabwe, were long believed to be Phoenician in origin.