sour taste

"But you said you were foreigners," the woman at the toll gate protests.

A breeze whips across the tufts of grey grass like hair. It is not a difficult climb up to the grave: an elderly Mrs Prescott laboured up here the day Rhodes was buried, he reminds me.

The moss has turned yellow and papery on the slabs of stone. High up now in the afternoon light, the balancing rocks look other-worldly. It's not hard to imagine throngs of people toiling their way up to bury the man. Not far from him lies Jameson, then, on an outcrop, Coghlan. "It's a kind of Heroes Acre* for colonials," he says grimly.

The children chase a giant blue-headed lizard. "What's that box?" asks Bella. At the edge of the ledge is a memorial to the Allan Wilson Patrol of 1893. There's a carved frieze of the men round the edges. "To Brave Men," it reads. "That's where they've put the two brave men," says tow-haired Hunty, whose ancestor Huntsman W was an early settler.

"Don't run," we call after them.

I break off a piece of Resurrection Plant. If you sink one of these dark dried twigs in water, it turns green. My father-in-law turns to his cousin on the way down. "How much did they make you pay for this?"

"55 US," she says. "10 each for adults." We confront the woman at the gate. You pay one fee to get into the Matopos National Park, extra to visit Rhodes Grave. Foreigners pay 5 times the price of locals. We produce our Zimbabwean identity cards. "But you said you were foreigners," the woman protests. Why on earth would we do that, we ask. A riot policeman in a faded uniform appears. "Look in the receipt book," he says. We do -- and see we've been carefully entered in blue biro as Zimbabweans. So where's our change? "You can't have the money," the pair say in unison.

"It'll look like there's been fraud."

* Heroes Acre: burial ground in Harare where black fighters from the war for independence are buried (almost all ZANU-PF)