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Against the grey rock of the kopjes it showed no more than a crow against a thundercloud. It didn't need to run away; all it had to do was to stand still and melt into the background. Suddenly as these memories chased across my brain I thought of my present case and applied the moral. The Black Stone didn't need to bolt. They were quietly absorbed into the landscape.

Presently came the sound of distant musketry not so very distant either. Everyone pricked up his ears. Two miles away to the left was a green hill broken by rocky kopjes. Looking through my glasses I could see ten or twelve riderless horses grazing. A mile further on a group of Boers sheltering behind a kopje from the continual fire was visible.

In the retreat the Free State and the Transvaal commandoes took different directions, myself remaining with the latter. We marched all night, past frowning kopjes, and camped in a thick mimosa forest at dawn. Here the commando decided to remain for a while. I obtained a pass from Liebenberg and set off alone to make my way through the dense bush to Middelburg.

A brisk skirmish against Boer riflemen, who as usual have been quick to occupy commanding kopjes; showers of shrapnel hurled among them from our field battery; a few shells tearing up the dust in clouds in their distant camp; and two of our own Lancers hit, makes up the story of this affair, which serves to show conclusively that communication by road in that direction is barred, if not effectually cut.

But for this most providential delay it is probable that the ultimate fighting would have been, not among the mountains and kopjes of Stormberg and Colesberg, but amid those formidable passes which lie in the Hex Valley, immediately to the north of Cape Town, and that the armies of the invader would have been doubled by their kinsmen of the Colony.

A thousand mounted infantry and one battery are to move in the direction of Hlangwane that is the hill, you know, this side of the river to the right of Colenso. We shall cover the right flank of the general movement and endeavour to take up a position on the hill, where the battery will pepper the Boers on the kopjes north of the bridge.

So to my tale. It was the 1st of May. We had the Boers hard pressed in Thaba Nchu in a run of kopjes that reached in almost unbroken sequence farther than a man's eye might reach. The flying French was with us, chafing like a leashed greyhound because he could not sweep all before him with one impetuous rush.

He had not only to contend against a biting north-west wind, which temporarily got mixed up with a flurry of snow, but the course itself, from the character of the land, is about as difficult to score over as any in the country. The ground is one succession of 'kopjes, while seven of the nine holes are 'on the collar' all the time, and at an angle of from twenty to thirty degrees.

There is no room to tell how the experienced Melissa found a far-off frame so messed and mishandled by abandoned cell-building experiments that, for very shame, the bees never went there. How in that ruin she blocked out a Royal Cell of sound wax, but disguised by rubbish till it looked like a kopje among deserted kopjes.

"10 A.M. There is a wide plain in front of me, four miles across, flat as the sea, and all along the farther side a line of kopjes and hills rising like reefs and detached islands out of it.