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With that unison music in my ears I rose and knelt and rose again hastily. Then I ran round to the eastern wall under the zig-zag patterns. I came only just in time to see the sunrise by so doing. It was three days after that I caught up Spenser, the Government engineer. 'I have seen buildings in North Africa, he told me. 'They weren't much like those at Mabgwe.
Only, after all, it's African-built, and Europeans could do the thing a bit better, couldn't they? This sort of thing seems rather a wrong line of advance. If I hadn't seen Mabgwe so lately I mightn't mind so much. They showed us to a hut, a very clean one. 'That's better; that's ever so much better, he said. On the wall was a rude frieze in Bushman painting style, but white, not red.
'It's only a glorified stone cattle-byre, and an intensified stone Kaffir hut, Spenser commented. 'It's not even built the old Mabgwe way. These are only blocks of granite; a few of them broken, but not one of them dressed. And there's lots of mud to eke them out. 'Yet there's hope in the thing. It's not an artistic dead-end like Saint Uriel's, I pleaded.
In the north, if they built with stones they built with great slabs. But those granite flakes at Mabgwe were easy for a primitive people to manage a very primitive people. Very primitive, or why did they build on sand when, six inches deeper, they might have founded on bed-rock? They didn't understand arches, seemingly. They weren't very careful about bond in building, were they?
What's the good of him? said the bar-tender to me. 'If he could tell us how the Ruins came he might be worth a forty-pound cheque every month, or at least a twenty one. But he can't. We were discussing the new appointment of a Government Curator at the Mabgwe Ruins. I approved it, the bar-tender did not.
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