Alas! alas! all is lost. They are up—they touch the very plateau, when Grenville again drives them back with a terrific charge, crying out—“Hurrah, old man; bear up another moment—look yonder.” Leigh looks, and so do the Mormons, and with one accord they turn and fly down the rock—and why? Out yonder, under the setting sun, what do they see?—what do they hear?
Woe! woe! woe! to the Mormon host, for up the valley, at a long slinging trot, comes the crack regiment of the famous warriors of the Undi, led on to the charge by Amaxosa, the chief of their ancient house. The Saints form up in square against the rocks, heedless of their white foes above, as they try to meet the resistless charge of the Zulu impi, and stem the awful torrent which rolls up in a dark compact tide and flings itself upon them, even as the surf dashes itself against, against, up, up—ay, and right over the rocky shore. Then the awful battle-shout of the Undi is raised, and before the sun sets red in the western sky the entire Mormon army has been annihilated, and the victorious Zulu chief is grasping the hand of his “great white father,” whom he introduces to his brother-officers as the man who originated this mighty scheme of stern retribution and wholesale slaughter.
The Zulus respectfully take Grenville’s hand in turn, and gathering round our hero—whose magnificent exploits their chief has related to them, and whom they worship in consideration of the hundreds of bodies piled up on the slopes of the plateau—they give a tremendous shout, and announce that he has been elected their brother and a perpetual chief of the Sons of the Undi, and that his name henceforth amongst them will be “T’chaka, the great white father of his faithful people.”
As the little party of friends sat over their fire at the plateau that night, whilst their sable allies kept watch below, Grenville told the whole thrilling story of his plunge into the River of Death.
Being a practised diver and swimmer, he had gone into the gulf feet foremost; but dropping from such a fearful height, and knowing that the water was low, owing to its being the very end of the dry season, he had expected to be killed by being dashed against the rocks below the surface; fortunately for him, however, that portion of the chasm which he had selected for his awful leap, chanced to overhang a deep still pool, into which Grenville had dropped, and from which he had emerged almost unharmed; but, being immediately carried away by the river, he had, in the darkness, received several nasty knocks which almost deprived him of his senses. When he had been in the water for upwards of an hour, silently floating along with the stream, as he could nowhere find foothold upon the slippery sides of the cliff, our hero detected the current quickening; soon the stream grew faster and noisier, and all at once he noticed that he was no longer able to see the sky above, but was drifting along underground. In the awful horror of that moment Grenville almost went mad. He commenced a mighty and useless struggle against the resistless current, but found himself borne along like a feather.
Just, however, as he was losing hope, he struck first his foot, and then his knee, against something hard, and dropping into an upright posture found that he had been, all the time, attempting to swim in less than three feet of water, which just here ran like a mill-race.
Groping about, our friend at last succeeded in getting on a rock half out of the water, and hung there for hours, with his person benumbed from head to foot, and his senses paralysed. “He had,” he said, “come to the conclusion that nothing could be worse than his present position, and that he might as well drift wherever the stream chose to take him,” when all at once he noticed the dark, swift waters changing colour, and with a cry of joy recognised the fact that instead of being absolutely underground, he was only shut in by immense cliffs, thickly wooded to their very summits, and which all but entirely excluded the glad light of day; and day it was, the sun was up, and soon sent his welcome shafts of light streaming through the interlaced branches overhead, lighting the gloomy chasm in dim and ghostly fashion.
Pulling himself together, Grenville slipped back into the water, and, plucky fellow that he was, waded down the stream for about two hours, “having,” he said, “a hazy notion that he was doing the right thing by instinct.”
At the end of this time he entered a tunnel, and having groped his way along it for about a mile, had almost decided to turn back, when he suddenly passed an angle, and again saw daylight glimmering in the distance. All this time the water kept a uniform depth of about twelve inches only, and was thick with a curious kind of subaqueous weed, which gave him the impression that he was walking on soft damp moss.
Finally he reached the end of the tunnel, and was about to emergo into open daylight, when his hurried footsteps were arrested by the sound of a human voice speaking in the Zulu tongue.