With their prisoner strictly guarded, the party passed the night of the 29th August in the forest of Ngome, and Florian, as he flung himself on the dewy grass, with fevered limbs and aching head, felt an emotion of thankfulness that all was over, and it was nearly so with himself now!
The moon had not yet risen; the darkness was dense around the hut where lay Cetewayo, guarded by many a sabre and bayonet; and the jackals and hyenas were making night hideous with their howling, mingled at times with the yells of wild dogs.
Ever and anon the barking of baboons, as they swung themselves from branch to branch, seemed to indicate the approach of some great beast of prey, and the crackle of dry twigs suggested the slimy crawling of a poisonous snake.
So passed the night in the Forest of Ngome. With dawn the trumpet sounded 'To horse,' and again the whole party moved on the homeward way to Ulundi. The night in the dreary forest, lying out in the open, had done its worst for Florian. On reaching the camp he fell from his saddle into the arms of the watchful Tom Tyrrell, and was carried to his tent, prostrate and delirious.
Hence the tenor of the telegram received from the medical staff by Mr. Kenneth Kippilaw.
How Florian lived to reach Durban, conveyed there with other sick in the ambulance waggons, he never knew, so heavily was the hand of fever laid on him; but many a time he had seen, as in a dream, the horses straggling through bridgeless torrents, and graves dug amid the pathless wastes for those who died on the route, and were laid therein, rolled in their blanket, and covered up before their limbs were cold, till at last the village of Durban—for it is little else, though the principal seaport of Natal—was reached, and he was placed in an extemporised hospital.
In his weakness, after the delirium passed away, he felt always as one in a dream. The windows were open to the breeze from the Indian Ocean, and the roar of the surf could be heard without ceasing on the sandy beach, while at night the sharp crescent moon shone like a silver sabre in the clear blue sky, and, laden with the perfume of many tropical plants, the sweet air without struggled with the close atmosphere of the crowded hospital wards, in which our 'boy soldiers died like sick flies,' as a general officer reported.
And there he lay, hour after hour, wasted by the fever born of miasma and the jungle, rigid and corpse-like in outline, under the light white coverlet. For how long or how short this was to last no one ventured to surmise.
He had ceased now to toss to and fro on his pillow and pour forth incoherent babble, in which Revelstoke, Dulcie Carlyon, his boyish days, and the recent stirring events of the now-ended campaign were all strangely woven together, while Tom Tyrrell, now his constant attendant, who nursed him tenderly as a woman would have done, had listened with alarm and dismay. And more than once Florian had dreamed that Tom, bearded to the eyes, bronzed to negro darkness, and clad in an old patched regimental tunic, was not Tom at all, but Dulcie, the girl he loved so passionately, watching there, smoothing his pillow and holding the cup with its cooling draught to his parched lips.
'They say that fever must run its course, sir, whatever that means,' said Tom to the doctor.