The Matobo Hills are a landscape of granite domes and balancing boulders two billion years old in Matabeleland South, in Zimbabwe, south of Bulawayo, painted by San hunters in overhangs across thousands of years, petitioned for rain at the most powerful shrine in the country, and holding the densest population of black eagles known anywhere, and they are walked among rhino on foot and climbed for the view from the grave of Cecil Rhodes. The domes are whalebacks of bare granite called dwalas, and the balancing rocks on them were not stacked from above but weathered out of the ground, since the granite cracked into blocks below the surface and the soil washed away, leaving the rounded boulders piled as they were; the caves and overhangs carry the finest rock art in southern Africa, with the curved overhang at Silozwane covered in giraffe, kudu and rows of elongated human figures in red ochre layered over each other by San painters across generations. At Njelele, the rain shrine of the Mwari cult, the petitioners do not read an answer in the rock but hear a voice from it, and the shrine is closed to outsiders.
The rangers of the national park track rhino on foot, reading spoor and dung through the scrub until the group is a few dozen metres from grazing black or white rhino and signals everyone to stand still, one of the few places in Africa where this is done. Verreaux's eagles hunt the granite by surprise, sweeping low around a dome so the dassies on the far side never see them, and the pairs lay on the ledges from late April and fly their chicks by September. A staircase cut into bare granite climbs Malindidzimu, the hill of the spirits, to a summit ringed by balancing boulders where Rhodes had himself buried in 1902, with the kopjes running to the horizon on every side and a view he called the world's. Matobo is a country of stone eggs, and the eagles, the painters and the rainmakers have all used it.