(CNN) -- As a young freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela stepped out of a farmhouse hideout in South Africa, took 20 strides and dug a hole on the sprawling land. 

He leaned over, put in a semiautomatic pistol and 200 rounds of ammunition, and carefully put a khaki uniform over them. 

After covering them with heaps of soil, he sauntered back into his rural hideout in northern Johannesburg -- hoping to retrieve them soon. 

He never got a chance to fire a shot with the Makarov pistol. A few weeks after he buried it at the farm in Rivonia, he was hurled into prison for the next 27 years. 

That was in 1962, and the whereabouts of the gun -- now estimated at $3 million -- remain a mystery, said Nicholas Wolpe, the chief executive of Liliesleaf Farm, the former hideout now converted into a museum. 

A scramble to find the gun has sparked a frenzy among collectors, historians and Mandela fans. 

'It's interesting how we came to find out about the gun," Wolpe said. "Mandela visited Liliesleaf in 2003, and as we were walking around, he turned to me and asked, 'By the way, did you find my gun?" 

Wolpe said he was stunned. 

"I turned to him and said, 'Gun, what gun?' " 

Mandela then asked him to pinpoint where the main kitchen once stood. 

"He then made a 45-degree angle and said, '20 paces from here, I buried a gun,' " Wolpe said. 

During the visit, the two tried to retrace his steps using the paces as a guide, but the farm had undergone some changes, making it hard to determine the original location of the kitchen with certainty. 
When?
hoping to retrieve them soon. 