One hundred years ago
Mr. Rhodes is going to do a very strik- ing and picturesque thing. He is going to turn the ruins of Zimbabye — those inscrutable masses of hard bare stone which stand naked in the wilderness and yield no man their secret — into a Wal- halla for South Africa. There, according to a statement made by General Digby Willoughby to a Pall Mall interviewer, are to be deposited the bones of Major Wilson and the men who fell with him, and over them is to be placed a granite monument. Mr. Rhodes hopes to be buried there himself, and he expressed to General Willoughby his "hope that in time to come it would be as difficult to obtain sepulture in Zimbabye as it now is in Westminster Abbey." The ground is to be consecrated and a chapel erect- ed, and a trust is to be created for hold- ing the place in perpetuity. Mr. Rhodes has already provided £20,000 for the necessary expenses. The idea is as origi- nal as it is imaginative, and shows, what we have often noticed, how the great prehistoric remains always appeal in a special degree to men of English race. Stonehenge plays a far greater part with us than Carnac with the French. Go to Salisbury Plain at the dawn of the sum- mer solstice, and you will find a crowd collected to see the rays of the rising sun strike the altar-stone.
The Spectator 14 July 1894
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