All day they travelled Florian knew not in what direction, and when they found him sinking with exertion they gave him a kind of cake made of mealies to eat, and a draught of utywala from a gourd. This is Kaffir beer, or some beverage which is like thin gruel, but on which the army of Cetewayo contrived to get intoxicated on the night before the battle of Ulundi.
Early next day he was taken to a military kraal, situated in a solitary and pastoral plain, surrounded by grassy hills, where he was given to understand he would be brought before the king.
Like all other military kraals, it consisted of some hundred beehive-shaped huts, surrounded by a strong wooden palisade, nine feet high and two feet thick. He was thrust into a hut, and for a time left to his own reflections.
The edifice was of wicker-work made of wattles, light and straight, bent over at regular distances till they met at the apex, on the principle of a Gothic groined arch. The walls were plastered, the roof neatly thatched; the floor was hard and smooth. Across it ran a ledge, which served as a cupboard, where all the clay utensils were placed, and among these were squat-shaped jars capable of holding twenty gallons of Kaffir beer.
Ox-hide shields and bundles of assegais were hung on the walls, which were thin enough to suggest the idea of breaking through them to escape; but that idea no sooner occurred to the unfortunate prisoner than he abandoned it. He remembered the massive palisade, and knew that within and without were the Zulu warriors in thousands, for the kraal was the quarters of an Impi or entire column.
After a time he was brought before Cetewayo, who was seated in a kind of chair at the door of a larger hut than the rest, with a number of indunas (or colonels) about him, all naked save at the loins, wearing fillets or circlets on their shaven heads, and armed with rifles; and now, sooth to say, as he eyed this savage potentate wistfully and with dread anxiety, Florian Melfort thought not unnaturally that he was face to face with a death that might be sudden or one of acute and protracted torture.
There is no need for describing the appearance of the sable monarch, with whose face and burly figure the London photographers have made all so familiar; but on this occasion though he was nude, all save a royal mantle over his shoulders—a mantle said to have borne 'a suspicious resemblance to an old tablecloth with fringed edges'—he wore his other 'royal' ensignia, which these artists perhaps never saw—a kind of conical helmet or head-dress, with a sort of floating puggaree behind, and garnished by three feathers, not like the modern badge of the Prince of Wales—but like three old regimental hackles, one on the top and one on each side.
Near him Florian saw a white man, clad like a Boer, whom he supposed to be another unfortunate prisoner like himself, but who proved to be that strange character known as 'Cetewayo's Dutchman,' who was there to act as interpreter.
This personage, whose name was Cornelius Viljoen, had been a Natal trader, and acted as a kind of secretary to the Zulu King throughout the war; but latterly he was treated with suspicion, and remained as a prisoner in his hands, and now he was ordered to ask Florian a series of questions.
'Can you unspike the two pieces of cannon captured by the warriors of Dabulamanza at Isandhlwana?'