d I were on lookout on the kopje. There
had been a heavy storm in the afternoon and another broke as we reached
the hill. We crouched in our cloaks waiting for it to pass before
climbing up, as the ironstone boulders are supposed to attract the
lightning (I have heard it strike them; it makes a crack like a
pistol-shot, and Colonials don't like staying on the hill tops during a
storm). We passed all night on our airy perch among the rocks, half wet
and the wind blowing strong. It was a darkish and cloudy night, rather
cold. Watched the light die out of the stormy sky; the lightning
flickering away to leeward; wet gleams from the plain where the water
shone here and there; moaning and sighing of wind through rock and
branch. We were relieved by Lancers in the morning and jogged back to
Thornhill, where our little camp is, and I am writing this in the shade
of a big mimosa close to the garden wall.

"I have seen prints in shop windows of farms and soldiers, bits of
country life and war mixed, a party of Lancers or Uhlans calling at some
old homestead, watering their horses or bivouacking in the garden. Often
what I see now makes me think of these subjects. A large camp is hideous
and depressing; dirty and worn, the ground trampled deep in dust; filth
and refuse lying about; the entrails and skins of animals, flies,
beastly smells, and no excitement or animation. But these outlying
scenes, scouts, pickets, &c., have a peculiar interest. This garden, for
instance, is itself pretty and wild, with its tangle of figs, its avenue
of quinces (great golden fruit hanging), its aloes all down the side,
with heavy, blue spikes and dead stems sticking thirty feet in air,
branching and blackened like fire-scorched fir-trees, and its dark green
oranges and other fruit and flower-trees all mixed in a kind of
wilderness; and behind this the steep kopjes, with black boulders heaped
to the sky, and soft grey mimosas in between. It is a pretty spot in
itself, but what a different, strange interest is brought in by the two
or three carbines leaning against the wall, the ponies, ready saddled,
tethered at the corner, the hint of camp-fire smoke climbing up through
a clump of trees, and now and then a khaki-clad figure or two passing
between the trunks or lying under them asleep."

Here is another little extract, a bit of a night-spy by three of us on
the west side, where we had heard that the Douglas commando was
establishing a laager near a