about with
flat-crowned mimosa trees, and at the bottom of the hollow, a spring
of clear water welled up out of the earth, and formed a pool, round the
edges of which grew an abundance of watercresses of an exactly similar
kind to those which were handed round the table just now. Now we had no
food of any kind left, having that morning devoured the last remains
of a little oribe antelope, which I had shot two days previously.
Accordingly Hans, who was a better shot than Mashune, took two of the
three remaining Martini cartridges, and started out to see if he could
not kill a buck for supper. I was too weak to go myself.

"Meanwhile Mashune employed himself in dragging together some dead
boughs from the mimosa trees to make a sort of 'skerm,' or shelter for
us to sleep in, about forty yards from the edge of the pool of water.
We had been greatly troubled with lions in the course of our long tramp,
and only on the previous night have very nearly been attacked by them,
which made me nervous, especially in my weak state. Just as we had
finished the skerm, or rather something which did duty for one, Mashune
and I heard a shot apparently fired about a mile away.

"'Hark to it!' sung out Mashune in Zulu, more, I fancy, by way of
keeping his spirits up than for any other reason--for he was a sort of
black Mark Tapley, and very cheerful under difficulties. 'Hark to the
wonderful sound with which the "Maboona" (the Boers) shook our fathers
to the ground at the Battle of the Blood River. We are hungry now, my
father; our stomachs are small and withered up like a dried ox's paunch,
but they will soon be full of good meat. Hans is a Hottentot, and an
"umfagozan," that is, a low fellow, but he shoots straight--ah! he
certainly shoots straight. Be of a good heart, my father, there will
soon be meat upon the fire, and we shall rise up men.'

"And so he went on talking nonsense till I told him to stop, because he
made my head ache with his empty words.

"Shortly after we heard the shot the sun sank in his red splendour, and
there fell upon earth and sky the great hush of the African wilderness.
The lions were not up as yet, they would probably wait for the moon, and
the birds and beasts were all at rest. I cannot describe the intensity
of the quiet of the night: to me in my weak state, and fretting as I was
over the non-return of the Hottentot Hans, it seemed almost ominous--as
though Nature were brooding over some tragedy which was