ale of
the first downfall of the Zulu power told in the dead of night on the
very spot whereon had been contested the fierce and determined struggle
which had in effect decided the second--for it was the British success
at Kambula that rendered that at Ulundi assured--this tale, told, too,
by a living actor in those stirring events of the bygone annals of a
martial race, seemed to people all the surrounding waste; and looking
forth, it needed no great tax on the imagination to conjure up the
shades of slain warriors rising in hundreds from their common grave down
yonder on the slope; and, shield and spear-armed, re-forming in wild and
fantastic array of war.

And over and above such fanciful flights it was a tale to set one
thinking--if one had never thought before--of the senselessness of
deciding offhand the morality of this or that deed which helpeth to make
history from one hard-and-fast point of view, and that point of view the
British; or of stigmatising even a savage potentate as a treacherous and
cruel monster, because he is not particular as to his methods when it
becomes a question of preserving his nation's rights and his nation's
greatness, what time such are threatened and invaded by Christians, whom
subsequent events show to be the reverse of models of uprightness or
fair dealing themselves. And it was even as old Untuswa had said: "You
white people and ourselves see things differently, and I suppose it will
always be so."

Yes, it was a fitting episode in the annals of a warrior nation, that
tale of fierce wars, and intrigue, and sturdy loyalty, and even of a
chivalry, not exactly describable by the term "rude"; most of all, too,
was it a tale essentially human, showing how the same desires and
motives enkindle the same actions and their results in the heart that
beats beneath a brown skin as in that which beats beneath a white one.
And therein, perhaps, lay its greatest charm.

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