the victor.

But a still severer ordeal was in store for the virgin fortress and its
lord. After much indecisive strife, the whites and the Basutos were, in
1865, again engaged in a serious war. The people of what had then become
(see Chapter XI) the Orange Free State had found the Basutos troublesome
neighbours, and a dispute had arisen regarding the frontier line. The
Free State militia, well practised in native warfare, invaded
Basutoland, reduced many of the native strongholds and besieged Thaba
Bosiyo. A storming party advanced to carry the hill by assault, mounting
the steep open acclivity to the passage which is opened (as already
mentioned) by the greenstone dyke as it cuts its way through the line of
sandstone cliff. They had driven the Basutos before them, and had
reached a point where the path leads up a narrow cleft formed by the
decomposition of the dyke, between walls of rock some twenty feet high.
Thirty yards more would have brought them to the open top of the hill,
and Moshesh would have been at their mercy. But at this moment a bullet
from one of the few muskets which the defenders possessed, fired by a
good marksman from the rock above the cleft, pierced Wepener, the leader
of the assailants. The storming party halted, hesitated, fell back to
the bottom of the hill, and the place was once more saved. Not long
after, Moshesh, finding himself likely to be overmastered, besought the
Imperial Government, which had always regarded him with favour since the
conclusion of Sir George Cathcart's war, to receive him and his people
"and let them live under the large folds of the flag of England." The
High Commissioner intervened, declaring the Basutos to be thenceforward
British subjects, and in 1869 a peace was concluded with the Free State,
by which the latter obtained a fertile strip of territory along the
north-west branch of the Caledon which had previously been held by
Moshesh, while the Basutos came (in 1871) under the administrative
control of Cape Colony. Moshesh died soon afterwards, full of years and
honour, and leaving a name which has become famous in South Africa. He
was one of the remarkable instances, like Toussaint l'Ouverture and the
Hawaiian king Kamehameha the First, of a man, sprung from a savage race,
who effected great things by a display of wholly exceptional gifts. His
sayings have become proverbs in native mouths. One of them is worth
noting, as a piece of grim humour, a quality rare amo