rom one side alone, and
that could only be approached by an exposed and toilsome climb up a long
and rugged slope. A sentinel posted on the heights around could descry
the advance of an enemy for miles, and all the fighting force could
concentrate their efforts on the one accessible point. Of coarse a
couple of field-pieces planted on the nearest cliff could have banged
the place to rubbish in half an hour, but to foemen armed as themselves,
or even with rifles, this stronghold of the Igazipuza was a very
formidable fastness indeed, and not far short of impregnable.

All these points did Dawes and Gerard take in as, upon the afternoon of
the third day following their compulsory enterprise, the waggons creaked
and groaned behind their panting, toiling spans, up the rugged acclivity
aforesaid, whither their live stock, urged on by its very willing if
self-constituted drivers, had already preceded them in a now vanishing
cloud of dust. They noticed, too, on gaining the ridge whence they
could look down upon the great kraal lying a mile or so before and
beneath them, that the valley was one of considerable area, and though
bush-clad was green and grassy. There was yet one thing more they
noticed. Rising abruptly from the bush, about a mile and a half in the
rear of the kraal, was a conical tooth-shaped rock, the more noticeable
because it seemed to have no business to be there at all. It was a kind
of excrescence on the natural formation of the ground, which was there
smooth. Yet this strange pyramid, with its precipitous cliff-face, thus
shot up abruptly to a height of nearly a hundred feet.

Their cogitations on this and other matters were interrupted suddenly,
and in a manner which was somewhat alarming. From the tree-clad
hillsides arose the same wild roaring shout which had preceded the
massacre of the unfortunate Swazi runaways, and they beheld charging
down upon them from either side a band of armed men, shaking their
shields and assegais by way of adding to the strength and hideosity of
the uproar.

"All this dancing and bellowing is getting just a trifle thin--eh,
Ridgeley?" said Dawes, with a touch of ill-humour, as the savages came
surging round the waggons, and amusing themselves by yelling at, and now
and again goading, the already panting and terrified oxen. The Swazis,
who had not dared leave the sides of their white protectors, turned grey
with fear. This was too much like what had preceded the s