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The white man, too, dropped to the ground, throwing his rifle forward. "Nyama, bwana!" he whispered fiercely, "karibu sana!" He pointed cautiously over the white man's shoulder. The safari, at the sight of the two dropping to a crouch, had stopped as though petrified, and stood waiting in silence. "We have no meat," Simba reminded his master in Swahili.
Many of these furnaces, or their remains, are met with on knolls; those at work have a peculiarly tall hut built over them. On the eastern edge of a valley lying north and south, with the Diampwé stream flowing along it, and the Dzala nyama range on the western side, are two villages screened by fine specimens of the Ficus Indica.
When he endeavoured to trot or canter a cough took him fit to break his mother's heart. January 29, 1900. The only change to-day was the steady passage of Boers westward, to concentrate afresh round Taba Nyama. Their new laager up the Long Valley had disappeared. Large bodies of men had been seen coming up from Colenso. The crisis of the war in Natal is evidently near.
No message or tidings came through. The day was cloudy, and ended in quiet rain. We saw a few shells fall on the plain at the foot of Taba Nyama, and what looked like a few on the summit. But nothing else could be made out, except that the Boer ambulances were very busy driving round. Among ourselves the chief event was the feverish activity of the Telegraph Hill big gun.
The noise of guns boomed all day from the Tugela. It sounded as though a battle was raging along miles of its banks, from Colenso right away west to Potgieter's Drift. I could see big shells bursting again on Taba Nyama and the low nek above the ford. Further to the left they were bursting around Monger's Hill, nearly half-way along the bank to Colenso.
The clouds rested upon the tops of the hills as they came from the eastward, and then poured down plenteous showers on the valleys below. As soon as we could move, Tomba Nyama, the head man of the island, volunteered the loan of a canoe to cross a small river, called the Chongwe, which we found to be about fifty or sixty yards broad and flooded.
The camps are a little reduced. Only four tents are left in the white string that hung down the side of Taba Nyama. Two parties, of forty Boers apiece, passed north along the road behind Telegraph Ridge whilst I was on Observation Hill in the morning. But there was no special meaning in their movements, and absolutely no news came in.
Zomha is in a range of hills to our west, called Zala nyama. The Portuguese, in going to Casembe, went still further west than this. Passing on we came to a smithy, and watched the founder at work drawing off slag from the bottom of his furnace.
For they are suitable presents for ladies, but unhappily all that fell near me to-day exploded into fragments. The telescope on Leicester Post showed me nothing new. Not a single man was now to be seen on Spion Kop or the rest of Taba Nyama. At two o'clock the evil news reached us.
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