Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 12, 2025
They look like a group of solid indigo pyramids against the sunrise. Are those kopjes out of range? is a question that suggests itself as we draw alongside, leaving them wide on our port beam. Yes, no! No! a lock of smoke, white as snow, lies suddenly on the dark hillside, followed by fifteen seconds of dead silence.
Before reaching the open valley, however, strong parties of the enemy were found holding the rocky spurs and kopjes intervening. These after sharp fighting were carried with the bayonet by the Guides, 35th and 45th Sikhs, and the way was opened, the cavalry doing great execution amongst the flying enemy.
They were to off-saddle under some high kopjes about ten miles from town; they were to have a picnic and an amazing view. I could not go myself, as I had an appointment to keep. But I sent two Mashona boys to be their retinue; one of them was Johannes, my own right hand at home. I solemnly entrusted the strangers and their steeds to his keeping.
By-and-by the rifle fire on our left flank grew weaker and weaker our guns were searching the kopjes with merciless accuracy and before sundown it died away altogether, and we had time to collect our wounded and ascertain our losses, though we could not even guess how the Boers had fared Our wounded amounted to eight men all told, none of them dangerously hurt; of dead we had none, not one.
There were men to whom not only kopjes and stones were calling out imperatively, "What are we, and how came we here? Understand us, and know us;" but to whom even the old, old relations between man and man, and the customs of the ages called, and could not be made still and forgotten. The boy's heavy body quivered with excitement. So he was not alone, not alone.
It was like a vast prison, she thought drearily, while the grim, unfriendly kopjes were the sentinels that guarded her, and the far blue mountains were a granite wall that none might pass. The sun was low in the sky when they reached the watercourse. It was quite dry with white stones that looked like the skeletons of the ages scattered along its bed.
At 6.45 we started as advance-guard again, and marched for five and a half hours, with only a halt or two of a few minutes, to Senekal. The country gradually became flatter, the kopjes fewer and lower, till at last it was a great stretch of arid, dusty plain. It seemed quite strange to be driving on level ground, after endless hills and precipitous drifts.
The few burghers on the kopjes began to fire at them, and when I got to the top of one of the kopjes I saw the enemy about 100 in number fleeing in great disorder. This expedition cost them several dead and wounded, besides their plunder meal, fowls, and other things that they dropped in their flight.
The next morning Thorneycroft's regiment crossed, and, moving to the left, seized the kopjes facing Grobler's Kloof; the Boers, still suffering from the effect of their unexpected reverses, offered no resistance, but, abandoning all their camps, trenches, and redoubts, retired at once to the hill.
Was it, perhaps, the marvellous, translucent atmosphere, or was it the blue intensity of the dreaming kopjes, ornamented ever and anon by gleaming white battlements of granite, where the sun blazed down on giant boulders, or was it the unfathomable, mysterious, syren-like allurement of the country, that, without effort, without thought, steeped the senses in an irresistible fascination?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking