ck, I remember, was overhung with creepers, and often I had to
squeeze through thickets of tree-ferns. Countless little brooks ran
down from the hillside, threads of silver among the green pastures.
Soon I left the stream and climbed up on the shoulder, where the road
was not much better than a precipice. Every step was a weariness. I
could hardly drag one foot after the other, and my heart was beating
like the fanners of a mill, I had spasms of acute sickness, and it took
all my resolution to keep me from lying down by the roadside.

At last I was at the top of the shoulder and could look back. There was
no sign of anybody on the road so far as I could see. Could I have
escaped them? I had been in the shadow of the trees for the first
part, and they might have lost sight of me and concluded that I had
avoided the glen or tried one of the faces. Before me, I remember,
there stretched the upper glen, a green cup-shaped hollow with the
sides scarred by ravines. There was a high waterfall in one of them
which was white as snow against the red rocks. My wits must have been
shaky, for I took the fall for a snowdrift, and wondered sillily why
the Berg had grown so Alpine.

A faint spasm of hope took me into that green cup. The bracken was as
thick as on the Pentlands, and there was a multitude of small lovely
flowers in the grass. It was like a water-meadow at home, such a place
as I had often in boyhood searched for moss-cheepers' and corncrakes'
eggs. Birds were crying round me as I broke this solitude, and one
small buck--a klipspringer--rose from my feet and dashed up one of the
gullies. Before me was a steep green wall with the sky blue above it.
Beyond it was safety, but as my sweat-dimmed eyes looked at it I knew
that I could never reach it.

Then I saw my pursuers. High up on the left side, and rounding the rim
of the cup, were little black figures. They had not followed my trail,
but, certain of my purpose, had gone forward to intercept me. I
remember feeling a puny weakling compared with those lusty natives who
could make such good going on steep mountains. They were certainly no
men of the plains, but hillmen, probably some remnants of old Machudi's
tribe who still squatted in the glen. Machudi was a blackguard chief
whom the Boers long ago smashed in one of their native wars. He was a
fierce old warrior and had put up a good fight to the last, till a
hired impi of Swazis had surrounded his hidin