y strong enough
to induce her to risk her life upon his behalf, all we fugitives were
dragged ashore somehow by our friends. Here, Hans, I and the ladies
collapsed exhausted, though Brother John still found sufficient strength
to do what he could for the injured Stephen and Mavovo.

Then the Battle of the Reeds began, and a fierce fray it was. The Pongos
who were about equal in numbers to our people, came on furiously, for
they were mad at the death of their god with his priest, the Motombo,
of which I think news had reached them and at the carrying off of the
Mother of the Flower. Springing from their canoes because the waterway
was too narrow for more than one of these to travel at a time, they
plunged into the reeds with the intention of wading ashore. Here their
hereditary enemies, the Mazitu, attacked them under the command of old
Babemba. The struggle that ensued partook more of the nature of a series
of hand-to-hand fights than of a set battle. It was extraordinary to see
the heads of the combatants moving among the reeds as they stabbed at
each other with the great spears, till one went down. There were few
wounded in that fray, for those who fell sank in the mud and water and
were drowned.

On the whole the Pongo, who were operating in what was almost their
native element, were getting the best of it, and driving the Mazitu
back. But what decided the day against them were the guns of our Zulu
hunters. Although I could not lift a rifle myself I managed to collect
these men round me and to direct their fire, which proved so terrifying
to the Pongos that after ten or a dozen of them had been knocked over,
they began to give back sullenly and were helped into their canoes by
those men who were left in charge of them.

Then at length at a signal they got out their paddles, and, still
shouting curses and defiance at us, rowed away till they became but
specks upon the bosom of the great lake and vanished.

Two of the canoes we captured, however, and with them six or seven
Pongos. These the Mazitu wished to put to death, but at the bidding
of Brother John, whose orders, it will be remembered, had the same
authority in Mazitu-land as those of the king, they bound their arms and
made them prisoners instead.

In about half an hour it was all over, but of the rest of that day I
cannot write, as I think I fainted from utter exhaustion, which was not,
perhaps, wonderful, considering all that we had undergone in the four