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They have trekked back along the Middelburg Road, and are a dozen miles off by now, I'll be bound. Now, no words; go, both of you. "Tom, the driver, swore and caught the lad a hearty kick, which he richly deserved, and then, having tied old Kaptein up to the disselboom with a riem, they took their assegais and sticks, and started.
Just at that instant the unhappy offender appeared, coming to ask pardon of the king, and to explain the reason of his apparent negligence. He was met by the executioners of the king's pleasure, and before he could open his mouth he was pierced through and through by a score of assegais. When his dead body was dragged up to the waggon, the king simply nodded his approval of the act.
Panting and begrimed with smoke and powder, we stood looking at each other and around us. The tents of the waggons were ripped to pieces, in our own I counted more than sixty spear cuts, and the trampled turf inside the laager was like the back of an angry porcupine, for from it we gathered nearly fourteen hundred heavy assegais.
A dreadful thought flashed into her mind and made her heart stand still, but she dismissed it. No, she had not come to that! Her eyes wandering round the kennel lit upon Jantje's assegais and sticks in the corner, and these gave her another inspiration. Jantje should do the deed.
Some little three-legged wooden sleeping-pillows and a few cooking-pots made up its sole furniture besides. In one corner rested a bundle of assegais and war-shields, and opposite the door were ranged several large calabashes full of "twala" or native beer. The chief's son and all the women followed us into the hut.
Groans and cries followed the discharge, and the dark mass of human beings, with the ladders on which they had stood, fell crashing below. Still others came on, evidently determined to gain an entrance at all costs. Although the muskets of the defenders had performed their deadly work, they themselves had not escaped unscathed from the assegais of the Zulus.
The circle was formed two deep, the men of the outer ring sloping their shields outwards and those on the inner ring sloping their shields inwards, so as to ward off the assegais passing over the opposite edges of the circle. The Makalakas came on, making a horrible noise in which a buzzing sound seemed to mingle with a rumble formed in the throat.
Their arms consisted of a long lance similar to that carried by the White Kendah, and a straight, cross-handled sword suspended from a belt. This, as I ascertained afterwards, was the regulation cavalry equipment among these people. The footmen carried a shorter spear, a round leather shield, two throwing javelins or assegais, and a curved knife with a horn handle.
It seems almost laughable to talk of steel shirts in these days of bullets, against which they are of course quite useless; but where one has to do with savages, armed with cutting weapons such as assegais or battleaxes, they afford the most valuable protection, being, if well made, quite invulnerable to them.
All about the plain lay Englishmen and Zulus, as they had died in the dread struggle: here side by side, amidst rusted rifles and bent assegais, here their bony arms still locked in the last hug of death, and yonder the Zulu with the white man's bayonet through his skull, the soldier with the Zulu's assegai in what had been his heart.
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