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Ch. 2: The Traditional Ophir Land

Ch. 2: The Traditional Ophir Land Page of 449 Ch. 2: The Traditional Ophir Land Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
IN TRADITIONAL OPHIR LAND                  69
partly hidden by a huge camphor tree, which measures nine feet in diameter.
As the expedition advanced, it found various promising showings of copper ore, and the croppings were particularly rich in a range lying a little below the meridian of 300 S., where one peak was singled out as " copper mountain." Van der Stel had succeeded in reaching the line of the supposed location of the golden city of Vigiti Magna, and he pushed his search along
this line to the Atlantic, but he could nowhere pick up a trace of the traditional city or any other vestige of the realm of Monomotapa. He did not even meet with any strange mon­sters or romantic adventures, except perhaps the charge of a huge rhinoceros, which upset his coach and forced him to fly for his life. After six months of travel his notable exploring party came back to the Cape, without any tidings of good cheer to the founders of the colony. The only relic of the tradition of empire left in the lands it had traversed was the attaching of the name of Vigiti Magna to the great river first shown on any map in the chart of this exploration. It had found rich copper ore in Namaqualand, but the deposits were too far from the base
Ch. 2: The Traditional Ophir Land Page of 449 Ch. 2: The Traditional Ophir Land
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