A short off-saddle, about midnight, relieved the march. At length, in the black hour succeeding the setting of the moon, Hlangulu called a halt.
“We must leave the horse here,” he said. “We can hide him in yonder cleft until to-morrow night. It will not be safe to ride him any further, Isipau. Look!”
The other had already beheld that to which his attention was now directed. For a dull glow arose upon the night, and that at no great distance ahead: a glow as of fires. And, in fact, such it was; for it was the glow of the watch-fires of one of the armed pickets, guarding, day and night, the approaches to the sacred neighbourhood of the King’s grave.
Chapter Ten.
Umzilicazi’s Grave.
The huge granite pile loomed forth overhead, grim, frowning, indistinct. Then, as the faint streak in the blackness of the eastern horizon banded into red width, the outlines of the great natural mausoleum stood forth clearer and clearer.
Blachland’s pulses beat hard, as he stood gazing. At last he had reached the goal of his undertaking—at last he stood upon the forbidden ground. The uneasy consciousness that discovery meant Death—death, moreover, in some barbarous and lingering form—was hardly calculated to still his bounding pulses. He stood there alone. Hlangulu had come as near as he dared, and, with the minutest instructions as to the nearest and safest approach, had hidden to await his return.
How they had eluded the vigilance of the pickets our explorer hardly knew. He called to mind, however, a moment which, if not the most exciting moment of his life, at any rate brought him within as grim a handshaking proximity to certain death as he had ever yet attained. For, at the said moment, Hlangulu had drawn him within a rock cleft—and that with a quick muscular movement which there was neither time nor opportunity to resist, but which, a second later, there was no inclination to, as he beheld—they both beheld—a body of Matabele warriors, fully armed, and seeming to rise out of nowhere, pass right over the very spot just occupied by themselves. He could see the markings of the hide shields, could even make out the whites of rolling eyeballs in the starlight, as the savages flitted by and were gone.