United States or São Tomé and Príncipe ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But, in addition to the ostriches, there were several other exceedingly interesting objects and sights clearly distinguishable from the summit of the kopje, of which no hint was obtainable from the level of the plain below.
After a period of humdrum service he was sent off with a section of mounted infantry to round up a certain farm-house suspected of harbouring Boer combatants. The excursion was a mere matter of routine of humdrum commonplace. As usual it was made at night, but this was a night of full dazzling moon. The farm lay in a hollow of the veldt, first seen from the crest of a kopje.
The long afternoon was half spent, and the kopje was just beginning to cast its shadow over the round-headed yellow flowers that grew between it and the farmhouse. Among the flowers the white butterflies hovered and on the old kraal mounds three white kids gambolled, and at the door of one of the huts an old grey-headed Kaffer-woman sat on the ground mending her mats.
We had our haversacks pretty well lined, and each man had, of course, his water-bottle; but the possibility of being held up for over twenty-four hours was enough to make the Colonel give orders for an examination of the ruins and the rocks of the kopje around, to see if water could be found.
Black blood flows thick with superstition, and both the Kaffir cook and the snuff-coloured Hottentot chambermaid nourished a wholesome dread of spooks. Who knew but that the white woman's ghost would rise out of the kopje there, some dark night, and pinch and cuff and thump and beat people who had ill-used her bantling?
The kopje was about 1,000 to 1,200 yards from my laager. I was riding a chestnut horse. I went to the kopje alone, but a man by the name of Michael Coetzee, whom I intend to call as a witness, was on the kopje on duty as a sentinel. I remained there a considerable time. I saw cannon-firing on a little ridge on the Colony side of the river. I heard rifle-fire while I was on the kopje.
"P'raps she's makin' up a new song," Jigger said to himself. On a kopje overlooking the place where Ian Stafford had been laid to sleep to the call of the trumpets, two people sat watching the sun go down. Never in the years that had gone had there been such silence between them as they sat together.
He was big, manly, and of impressive size, and, although he speaks English, he dictated to his adjutant many long and Old-World compliments to the Greater Republic across the seas. We found the people in the farm-house on the distant kopje quite hysterical over the near presence of the British, and the entire place in such an uproar that we slept out in the veldt.
Sometimes they climbed nearly to the top of a kopje, the mules going up stairways of granite as if born to it, and the lovely country lay outspread in a glorious panorama before them.
Riding on again, towards sundown they came to another of their old camping-places, also a bush-covered kopje. Here the spring of water was more than halfway up the hill, so there they off-saddled in a green bower of a place that because of its ferns and mosses looked like a rock garden. Now, although they had enough cold meat for food, they thought themselves quite safe in lighting a fire.
Word Of The Day