by another smaller knoll. Behind us
stretched bushland, or rather broken land, where mimosa thorns grew in
scattered groups, sloping down to the banks of the Tugela about four
miles away.

Shortly after dawn I was roused from the place where I slept, wrapped
up in some blankets, under a mimosa tree--for, of course, we had no
tents--by a messenger, who said that the Prince Umbelazi and the white
man, John Dunn, wished to see me. I rose and tidied myself as best I
could, since, if I can avoid it, I never like to appear before natives
in a dishevelled condition. I remember that I had just finished brushing
my hair when Umbelazi arrived.

I can see him now, looking a veritable giant in that morning mist.
Indeed, there was something quite unearthly about his appearance as
he arose out of those rolling vapours, such light as there was being
concentrated upon the blade of his big spear, which was well known as
the broadest carried by any warrior in Zululand, and a copper torque he
wore about his throat.

There he stood, rolling his eyes and hugging his kaross around him
because of the cold, and something in his anxious, indeterminate
expression told me at once that he knew himself to be a man in terrible
danger. Just behind him, dark and brooding, his arms folded on
his breast, his eyes fixed upon the ground, looking, to my moved
imagination, like an evil genius, stood the stately and graceful Saduko.
On his left was a young and sturdy white man carrying a rifle and
smoking a pipe, whom I guessed to be John Dunn, a gentleman whom, as it
chanced, I had never met, while behind were a force of Natal Government
Zulus, clad in some kind of uniform and armed with guns, and with them a
number of natives, also from Natal--"kraal Kafirs," who carried stabbing
assegais. One of these led John Dunn's horse.

Of those Government men there may have been thirty or forty, and of the
"kraal Kafirs" anything between two and three hundred.

I shook Umbelazi's hand and gave him good-day.

"That is an ill day upon which no sun shines, O Macumazana," he
answered--words that struck me as ominous. Then he introduced me to John
Dunn, who seemed glad to meet another white man. Next, not knowing what
to say, I asked the exact object of their visit, whereon Dunn began to
talk. He said that he had been sent over on the previous afternoon by
Captain Walmsley, who was an officer of the Natal Government stationed
across the border, to try to make peac