attles; and the interest they
still excite justifies a short description of the place.

Laing's Nek, a ridge 5500 feet above the sea and rising rather steeply
about 300 feet above its southern base, is close to the Quathlamba
watershed, which separates the streams that run south into the Indian
Ocean from those which the Vaal on the north carries into the Orange
River and so to the Atlantic. It is in fact on the south-eastern edge of
that great interior table-land of which I have so often spoken. Across
it there ran in 1881, and still runs, the principal road from Natal into
the Transvaal Republic,--there was no railway here in 1881,--and by it
therefore the British forces that were proceeding from Natal to
reconquer the Transvaal after the outbreak of December, 1880, had to
advance to relieve the garrisons beleaguered in the latter country.
Accordingly, the Boer levies, numbering about a thousand men, resolved
to occupy it, and on January 27 they encamped with their waggons just
behind the top of the ridge. The frontier lies five miles farther to the
north, at the village of Charleston, so that at the Nek itself they were
in the territory of Natal. The British force of about one thousand men,
with a few guns, arrived the same day at a point four miles to the
south, and pitched their tents on a hillside still called Prospect Camp,
under the command of General Sir George Colley, a brave officer, well
versed in the history and theory of war, but with little experience of
operations in the field. Undervaluing the rude militia opposed to him,
he next day attacked their position on the Nek in front; but the British
troops, exposed, as they climbed the slope, to a well-directed fire from
the Boers, who were in perfect shelter along the top of the ridge,
suffered so severely that they had to halt and retire before they could
reach the top or even see their antagonists. A monument to Colonel
Deane, who led his column up the slope and fell there pierced by a
bullet, marks the spot. Three weeks later (after an unfortunate skirmish
on the 8th), judging the Nek to be impregnable in front, for his force
was small, but noting that it was commanded by the heights of Majuba
Hill, which rise 1500 feet above it on the west, the British general
determined to seize that point. Majuba is composed of alternate strata
of sandstone and shale lying nearly horizontal and capped--as is often
the case in these mountains--by a bed of hard igneous ro