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Thus, the enemy would either get reinforcements from Pretoria or escape when it got dark. Both our flanks kept up a constant fire on the slopes, and on the white kopje, but the shoulders were too high for a proper aim, and the khakies lay fast behind the boulders and in the clefts of the rocks.
The reconnaissance showed that General Porter, commanding the defence, had utilised the ground to the best advantage. A powerful artillery, posted just in rear of the crest, swept the entire length of the slopes, and under cover in rear were dense masses of infantry, with a strong line of skirmishers pushed down the hill in front.
Now and then their glances met, and she gave him an affectionate smile which consoled him. But the wildness of the gorge was beginning to soften, the two walls of rock to grow lower; they passed between two peaceful hills, with gentle slopes covered with thyme and lavender.
A famous dropping-well, whose waters possess the power of rapidly petrifying every object exposed to them, is one of the most noticeable things in the neighborhood. There are also one or two curious rockcut cells, high up on precipitous slopes, which were inhabited years ago by pious recluses who had withdrawn from the vanities of the world.
After speaking of what nature really does for it in the way of vegetation and fruits, he continues: "An admirable terrace-cultivation, where art and industry have combined to overcome the obstacles of nature, has everywhere converted the slopes, naturally sterile and arid, into a succession of gardens, loaded with the choicest vegetable productions.
The slopes along which Marius marched were probably well-wooded, and he was unobserved by the Teutons. They had spent one whole day in pacing along the straight flat Roman road under Mont Victoire.
The little, flat-roofed, white houses are dotted about among gardens and trees, and resemble the square white dice one throws out of a box. Very much as it appears to us now must this little hill-village have looked to Jesus when He lived here, except that the slopes of the hills were more cultivated, and there were more houses. Jesus came here as a small child and lived here until He was thirty.
In the east the plateau slopes away and peters out in the lowlands, so that, as one might say, the Black Forest forms a kind of huge natural springboard to afford one a good running jump across the Rhine into Alsace. All that day they tramped southward, meeting not a soul, and feeling almost as if they were in a church.
The rest of that short day we spent in setting up our tent in the cave, in front of which we lit a large fire, and in a survey of the slopes of the mountain, for we told the monk that we were searching for the tracks of wild sheep. Indeed, as it happened, on our way back to the cave we came across a small herd of ewes feeding upon the mosses in a sheltered spot where in summer a streamlet ran.
A thin fringe of ash- trees ran about the hill-tops, like ivy on a ruin; but on the lower slopes, and far up every glen, the Spanish chestnut-trees stood each four- square to heaven under its tented foliage.
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