To Ernst, the Great Zimbabwe Ruins were nothing more than a pile of stones with no real technical merit. Just like the Egyptian pyramids, talking about their cultural value was pure nonsense.
Those civilizations had all been completely severed. Ancient Egypt's own civilization had first had its regime wiped out by Rome, then been utterly erased by the Arabs.
As for the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, they had left no clues whatsoever in the river of history. A similar case existed in South America with Machu Picchu, though Machu Picchu could at least be confirmed as the work of the Indians.
Whether Great Zimbabwe had even been the work of Africa's indigenous peoples was questioned by Europeans, because the surrounding natives themselves possessed no inherited craft traditions connected to those ruins and did not even know where they had come from.
So much so that early Europeans had gone mad enough to link the Great Zimbabwe Ruins to Solomon's treasures. By the twenty-first century, with no evidence to prove who had built them, they were classified as having been built by natives according to the principle of proximity.
In Ernst's view, however, it did not matter who had built them. All stone-built ruins in the world were products of strength working miracles, belonging to the category of wonders. Those ancient slave-owning monarchs had surely all loved creating wonders.
Ernst himself also liked wonders, though East Africa's current conditions were too limited for him to put such plans into practice. He did not know whether most boys liked playing with mud when they were young, but he certainly had.
The Great Zimbabwe Ruins served as a transit station, a microcosm of East Africa's invasion of the Matabele Plateau. They had barely even come into contact with the local natives.
The army