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This high priest had incited the rebels to a general massacre of women and children, and had given them confidence by promising to strike the white soldiers blind and to turn their bullets into water. Armstrong had discovered the secret hiding-place of Umlimo, and Carrington ordered Burnham to penetrate the enemy's lines, find the god, capture him, and if that were not possible to destroy him.
Accordingly, Carrington looked about for some measure by which he could bring the war to an immediate end. It was suggested to him by a young Colonial, named Armstrong, the Commissioner of the district, that this could be done by destroying the "god," or high priest, Umlimo, who was the chief inspiration of the rebellion.
The adventure was a most desperate one. Umlimo was secreted in a cave on the top of a huge kopje. At the base of this was a village where were gathered two regiments, of a thousand men each, of his fighting men. For miles around this village the country was patrolled by roving bands of the enemy.
For minutes at a time they lay as motionless as the granite bowlders around or squirmed and crawled over loose stones which a miss of hand or knee would have dislodged and sent clattering into the village. After an hour of this tortuous climbing the cave suddenly opened before them, and they beheld Umlimo.
When they reached the base of the kopje in which Umlimo was hiding, they concealed their ponies in a clump of bushes, and on hands and knees began the ascent. Directly below them lay the village, so close that they could smell the odors of cooking from the huts, and hear, rising drowsily on the hot, noonday air, voices of the warriors.
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