deeper than ever.

And that--heigh-h-ho!--makes a week of it. Relieve us, in Heaven's name,
good countrymen, or we die of dulness!

XIV.

NEARING THE END.

DULNESS INTERMINABLE--LADYSMITH IN 2099 A.D.--SIEGES OBSOLETE
HARDSHIPS--DEAD TO THE WORLD--THE APPALLING FEATURES OF A
BOMBARDMENT.

_November 26, 1899._

I was going to give you another dose of the dull diary. But I haven't
the heart. It would weary you, and I cannot say how horribly it would
weary me.

I am sick of it. Everybody is sick of it. They said the force which
would open the line and set us going against the enemy would begin to
land at Durban on the 11th, and get into touch with us by the 16th. Now
it is the 26th; the force, they tell us, has landed, and is somewhere on
the line between Maritzburg and Estcourt; but of advance not a sign.

Buller, they tell us one day, is at Bloemfontein; next day he is coming
round to Durban; the next he is a prisoner in Pretoria.

The only thing certain is that, whatever is happening, we are out of it.
We know nothing of the outside; and of the inside there is nothing to
know.

Weary, stale, flat, unprofitable, the whole thing. At first, to be
besieged and bombarded was a thrill; then it was a joke; now it is
nothing but a weary, weary, weary bore. We do nothing but eat and drink
and sleep--just exist dismally. We have forgotten when the siege began;
and now we are beginning not to care when it ends.

For my part, I feel it will never end.

It will go on just as now, languid fighting, languid cessation, for ever
and ever. We shall drop off one by one, and listlessly die of old age.

And in the year 2099 the New Zealander antiquarian, digging among the
buried cities of Natal, will come upon the forgotten town of Ladysmith.
And he will find a handful of Rip Van Winkle Boers with white beards
down to their knees, behind quaint, antique guns shelling a cactus-grown
ruin. Inside, sheltering in holes, he will find a few decrepit
creatures, very, very old, the children born during the bombardment. He
will take these links with the past home to New Zealand. But they will
be afraid at the silence and security of peace. Having never known
anything but bombardment, they will die of terror without it.

So be it. I shall not be there to see. But I shall wrap these lines up
in a Red Cross flag and bury them among the ruins of Mulberry Grove,
that, after the excavations, the unnumbered readers