The war-shout of the royal house and the defiant slogan of the rebel clan, mingled in booming echoes from the overhanging cliffs, as the dark crescent line swept unswervingly on; the line of white shields, and the flanking companies of parti-coloured ones, the bristling groups of bright spears. In their wild and fantastic array, the red disk, the hideous stamp of their dreaded order, freshly painted on forehead and chest, the strength of ten men in the hopeless desperation of each, the doomed clansmen stood awaiting the shock. It came.
Then again was the silence of voices, but the tramp of striving feet as the conflicting crowd surged backwards and forwards—with the hiss and heave of a dark billow split up on a half-submerged rock—the crash of shields and weapons, the stagger of falling bodies, and the gasp of the slain beneath the savage slashing blows of the infuriated slayers. The Igazipuza are fighting like a race of giants. At this rate barely half the king’s force will return to Ulundi. All three of its leaders are wounded; Sobuza is streaming with blood, but still his gigantic form towers in the thick of the fray, still his battle-axe shears aloft in wavy circles of light, still his white shield shivers that of an opponent like the shock of a charging elephant.
Suddenly a sharp shrill warning cry rings forth. Even above the din of the strife there rises a doll, rambling sound which shakes the ground. Nearer, nearer it draws. Thunder? No. Even the combatants pause. A dense cloud of dust is rolling down the kloof, and through it can be seen a forest of bristling horns, a sea of rolling eyes. Even the combatants take up the warning shout, “Xwaya—xwaya! ’Zinkomo!”
(“Look out—look out! The cattle!”)
Like a whirlwind the frantic herd sweeps down the narrow gorge. Bellowing, leaping, throwing up their horns, the maddened beasts plunge onward, hundreds and hundreds of them, shaking the earth with the thunder of their hoofs, smothering and blinding all with the cyclone of their dust, heading for the outlet. There is no staying the headlong course of the stampeded beasts. The whole impi will be crashed to pulp by the horned terror. In dismay the combatants spring helter-skelter up the rocks, and it goes roaring and thundering by, crushing many as it does so.
Whether the move was a spontaneous one, and that the animals, frantic with the shouting and the reek of blood, and all penned up moreover in such small compass, had stampeded of their own accord, or whether it was a last desperate resource on the part of the Igazipuza to crush and destroy the king’s impi, could not at the time be determined. Both parties, for the moment dazed, now rushed at each other with renewed access of fury—but it could not last. The numbers of the Igazipuza had dwindled frightfully; all cohesion among them was at an end. They were now broken up into groups, still fighting desperately.
“Yield, wizards!” roared Sobuza. “To fight on is death.”
“Ha, ha! We laugh at death, leader of the king’s hunting-dogs!” came the jeering reply.
“Taste it, then!” thundered the chief, springing at the largest of these groups, and, whirling a heavy knobkerrie aloft, for his battle-axe was broken, he smashed in the skull of the speaker like an eggshell. With a roar and a rush the king’s impi surged forward, overwhelming the now scattered groups by sheer weight of numbers. The battle was at an end.
In ghastly staring heaps, their splintered weapons still gripped in their dying throes, still half covered by their hacked shields, the corpses of the Igazipuza warriors lay, gashed and streaming with blood. Grimly, sullenly, to the death had they fought, and now there were none left to fight. The king’s troops, too, had suffered severely. Gcopo, the leader of the Ngobamakosi, had been killed, and Matéla, the sub-chief, was badly wounded with assegai thrusts, and many a staunch fighting man of that regiment and of the Udhloko had fallen.