my father, I am old. What have I do with the battle any more,
with the battle and its joy? Yet it is better to die in such a fight
as that than to live any other way. I have seen such--I have seen many
such. Oh! we could fight when I was a man, my father, but none that I
knew could ever fight like Umslopogaas the Slaughterer, son of Chaka,
and his blood-brother Galazi the Wolf! So, so! they swept them away,
those Halakazi; they swept them as a maid sweeps the dust of a hut, as
the wind sweeps the withered leaves. It was soon done when once it was
begun. Some were fled and some were dead, and this was the end of that
fight. No, no, not of all the war. The Halakazi were worsted in the
field, but many lived to win the great cave, and there the work must be
finished. Thither, then, went the Slaughterer presently, with such of
his impi as was left to him. Alas! many were killed; but how could they
have died better than in that fight? Also those who were left were as
good as all, for now they knew that they should not be overcome easily
while Axe and Club still led the way.

Now they stood before a hill, measuring, perhaps, three thousand paces
round its base. It was of no great height, and yet unclimbable, for,
after a man had gone up a little way, the sides of it were sheer,
offering no foothold except to the rock-rabbits and the lizards. No one
was to be seen without this hill, nor in the great kraal of the Halakazi
that lay to the east of it, and yet the ground about was trampled with
the hoofs of oxen and the feet of men, and from within the mountain came
a sound of lowing cattle.

"Here is the nest of Halakazi," quoth Galazi the Wolf.

"Here is the nest indeed," said Umslopogaas; "but how shall we come at
the eggs to suck them? There are no branches on this tree."

"But there is a hole in the trunk," answered the Wolf.

Now he led them a little way till they came to a place where the soil
was trampled as it is at the entrance to a cattle kraal, and they saw
that there was a low cave which led into the cliff, like an archway such
as you white men build. But this archway was filled up with great blocks
of stone placed upon each other in such a fashion that it could not be
forced from without. After the cattle were driven in it had been filled
up.

"We cannot enter here," said Galazi. "Follow me."

So they followed him, and came to the north side of the mountain, and
there, two spear-casts away, a soldier was standi