Au, Nkose! that was a sight. I have seen your countrymen lying in heaps at Isandhlwana, and I have been in many a hard-fought battle since that of which I am telling. But never have I seen so vast a number of slain as that evening at the Place of the Three Rifts. They lay, here in heaps, there thickly strewn in twos and threes. Many of my kindred and friends fell there, and of our captains and valiant leaders not a few, while two whole regiments of our incorporated slaves had gone down before the Zulu spears. Far and wide they lay, and of the enemy the number of slain was as great as ourselves, and among them some of our older men recognised many whom they had known before our flight from Tshaka. But among the chiefs and leaders we found not the body of Mhlangana nor that of Silwane.
Thus we returned, weary with the flight and the pursuit, but with pride, and joy, and triumph in our hearts, for we had beaten back the most formidable of our foes, and of whom we had gone in dread ever since we had been a nation. And already, though the day was nearly done, vast clouds of vultures were gathering in the heavens, which beholding, many laughed exultantly, remembering the presage in the Song of the Shield. But as the sun sank below the rim of the world, again the great smooth cliffs of the mountain face glowed blood-red, even as I alone had seen them glow the evening before the last, and so wonderful was this omen that many cried out that the mountain itself was bleeding afresh for those who lay slain beneath it, and that it was a place of tagati. And, indeed, who shall gainsay this, remembering the strange things which it had witnessed; yet was such magic good towards us though evil to our foes, since but for the heartening result of that wild, sweet, mysterious song, and the múti of the white shield, even the King’s strategy, perfect as it was, could hardly have availed to save the life of a nation. And this, and nothing less, is what was accomplished that day at the Place of the Three Rifts.
Chapter Twenty Six.
Lalusini’s Choice.
“So, Untúswa! My commands were those of a general gone mad?”
“Not so, Serpent of Wisdom,” I answered, “for the eyes of one who sits aloft see farther than those who watch below.”
“Yet the order must have seemed passing strange. Whau! but these bore their part as cubs of the lion indeed,” went on the King, his snuff-spoon arrested in mid-air, as he rolled his eyes in pride over the assemblage of our warriors, who, squatted in rank, were resting after their hard-won victory. “I almost looked to see you give way, for the host of Dingane was terrible in its might, and ye—ye looked but a mouthful to it.”
“See yonder, Great Great One,” I said, pointing upward to the cliff. “No living thing surely could find foothold there, yet thence floated forth a wondrous song, and that song saved the day, Calf of a Black Bull. For it hardened our hearts, which were already sinking, so that we fell upon our enemies each man with the strength of ten. And that song was the Song of the Shield!”