mounted troops for the rest of the day. Its position would be held until dusk by the general’s subordinate, Colonel Henry Pulleine, and his 24th Regiment of Foot.
The climbing sun burnt off the remaining drifts of morning mist. From its eastern ravine, the hunter heard that strange bee-like humming ebb and die, as if at the approach of the cavalry patrol.
With talons folded in its warm plumage, the observer’s quiet companion swooped and soared again. It hovered low above an isolated hill that stood in the centre of the plain between the eastern ridge and the camp at the foot of Isandhlwana. This splendid bird showed no fear of the man. A body lying prone in the tall grass of the slope could do it no harm.
Avoiding the sun’s reflection on the lenses of his field-glasses, the observer raised himself to inspect more fully the camp across the plain. He felt the dry flesh shrink on his face and the skin burn red on the points of his cheek-bones, under a ragged beard. The water-bottle beside him had been dry since the previous dusk, but he opened it from time to time and sucked at the cooler air of its interior, a substitute for water itself.
Then, stiff and ungainly, he stood up. It mattered nothing if they saw him now. With dawn and daylight, the time for suspicion was past. Twenty yards away, the dappled mare arched her neck and got slowly to her feet from the flattened grass. Everything was in place for the event that must follow, though the drama was not yet of his making. The period of his allotted patrol as a Natal Volunteer was not quite over, but he could move freely until the time came for his withdrawal through the camp itself. He had an hour in hand as he led the mare in an eastern semicircle to the near side of the ravine. There was silence now on all sides. By night, the perimeter guards were alert for a footfall or the brushing of grass. In the safety of daylight, no one below would pay him the least attention.
He worked his way carefully along the plateau until he could see the approach to the isolated Conical Kopje from east as well as west. Then, as he drew closer to the ravine, he heard again that strange, unaccountable buzzing. The mobilisation of a nation of bees. But still there was no movement to be seen on the plain below, nor on the ridges about him.
As he ambled to the east along the plateau, with the lazy progress of a Volunteer, his stony path ended presently at the sharp edge of the ravine, dropping five hundred feet to the level of the foothills. He walked the horse to the lip of this chasm. The sound of the hive grew louder until he stood behind chest-high scrub, where the ground sloped rapidly down. He looked through a gap in the branches into this narrow gorge and saw what he had known he was going to see.
A less-experienced observer might have thought that the sun and shade had played a trick upon his eyes. Where stretches of withered grass should have clothed the limestone slopes on either side of this declivity, the entire face of the ravine for a mile or more was dark and smooth, hung here and there with oval shields of animal hide. At several points, the sun caught polished metal. The humming that had echoed in the warmer air grew louder and more insistent. It was the warning of an army disturbed, of its warriors waking to the dawn of battle.
A stranger might have stood in admiration, for the carpet that covered the sides of the ravine was living and human. The massed battalions of a great Zulu battle force, perhaps ten thousand strong, lay or crouched in the concealment of this rift in the hills. Such was the flower of Cetewayo’s tribes, young men who had yet to earn the prize of a woman by dipping their spears in the blood of an enemy.
He stepped back cautiously for better concealment. Here and there the first ranks were rising slowly, stiff from rest but impatient for combat. Isandhlwana was to be the arena of the young men’s initiation. The washing of the spears. All their lives had been lived for this day.
Despite his own preparations and the care of his planning, a sudden fear at the sight of such numbers stung him like