Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 17, 2025
A British heliograph began flashing to us from Schwarz Kop, a hill only one and a half miles over Potgieter's or Springfield Drift on the Tugela. It is that way we have always expected Buller's main advance. Can this be the herald of it? Most of us have agreed never to mention the word "Buller," but it is hard to keep that pledge.
"The way we do in the scouts? Well, I guess that's because the heliograph is so much more secret. You see, with the heliograph the flashes are centered. You've got to be almost on a direct line with them, or not more than fifty yards off the centre line, to see them at all, even a mile away. But anyone can see flags, and read messages, unless they're in code.
All this time the Kimberley searchlight was night by night searching the neighbourhood lest any Boers under cover of the darkness should approach the town; and for most of the time, by heliograph or searchlight, the authorities were in communication with Lord Methuen on the other side of those forbidding kopjes. And yet help came not, and the situation was becoming desperate.
"Sure, but how could a graveyard cast a shadow they're always on level ground. No, I'm telling you, boy, that there cliff is the place lemme tell you how it got its name. A long time ago when the Indians were bad they had a soldiers' post right here where this town stands, and they kept a lookout up on the Picket Post butte, where they could heliograph clear down to Tucson.
Afternoon sunshine enabled General Buller to heliograph the reassuring message for which Ladysmith had been waiting so anxiously. He said: "I beat the enemy thoroughly yesterday, and am sending my cavalry on as fast as very bad roads will admit to ascertain where they are going. I believe the enemy to be in full retreat." It was even so.
Instantly, the ship shone like the polished mirror of a heliograph. Almost immediately, a low sound came from the distant city. It was a pulsing drone that came through the microphone in a weird cadence; a low, beating drone, like some wild music. Louder and stronger it grew, rising in pitch slowly, then it suddenly ended in a burst of rising sound a terrific whoop of alarm.
There remained still the case of the old man in whose house we had discovered the heliograph and the pigeons. And the gendarmes were again sent for and the Belgian farmer was haled before the officer.
Something deep in those dark clear pupils, out of that lean adventurous face, gleamed back at him, the distant flash of a heliograph, as it were, height to height, flashing 'Courage! He shuddered, and shut his eyes. 'But I would really rather, he aided in a quiet childlike way, 'I would really rather, Sheila, you left me alone now. His wife stood irresolute.
We hailed them, and they halted while we hurried towards them. It was a lieutenant and a couple of privates of the 8th Hussars, with a stand like a theodolite, which the artilleryman told me was a heliograph. "You are the first men I've seen coming this way this morning," said the lieutenant. "What's brewing?" His voice and face were eager. The men behind him stared curiously.
The mismanagement of affairs there and the whole system of hospital administration at Ladysmith will have to be investigated after the siege. At noon to-day we had hopes that the Boer right flank was being hard pressed. That is the only practicable way in, but the effort has apparently not been pushed far. The heliograph has begun to blink out a long message, and that is always a bad sign.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking