"On the following morning at dawn I attended at the drift in the faint
hope that Gita and her boy might arrive there as arranged. But nobody
came, which was not wonderful, seeing that Gita lay dead, stabbed
through and through, as I saw afterwards, (she made a good fight for
the child), and that her spirit had gone to wherever go the souls of the
brave-hearted, be they white or black. Only on the farther bank of the
river I saw some Zulu scouts who seemed to know my errand, for they
called to me, asking mockingly where was the pretty woman I had come to
meet?

"After that I tried to put the matter out of my head, which indeed was
full enough of other things, since now definite orders had arrived as to
the advance, and with these many troops and officers.

"It was just then that the Zulus began to fire across the river at such
of our people as they saw upon the bank. At these they took aim, and,
as a result, hit nobody. A raw Kaffir with a rifle, in my experience, is
only dangerous when he aims at nothing, for then the bullet looks after
itself and may catch you. To put a stop to this nuisance a regiment of
the friendly natives--there may have been several hundred of them--was
directed to cross the river and clear the kloofs and rocks of the Zulu
skirmishers who were hidden among them. I watched them go off in fine
style, and in the course of the afternoon heard a good deal of shouting
and banging of guns on the farther side of the river.

"Towards evening someone told me that our _impi_, as he called it
grandiloquently, was returning victorious. Having at the moment nothing
else to do, I walked down to the river at a point where the water was
deep and the banks were high. Here I climbed to the top of a pile of