The Governor-General and the regular troops had taken a route down the other side of the mountain, and we turned our faces towards Fort Hare, where he was supposed already to have arrived. We had not gone more than a quarter of a mile, when a bugle sounded the "halt" far up on the hills, and we perceived the white flag and two or three figures rapidly descending the mountain; bringing the promised letter. As two of our party went to receive it, the enemy's bugle above, sounded the "right incline," and keeping away in that direction, they avoided thereby, as we afterwards learned, a deep sluit, of which they were thus politely made aware. No force was to be seen to day. The purport of the letter, which was very well written in English, was to propose terms of peace without surrendering their leaders. His Excellency took no notice whatever of the proposal, and not only expressed his displeasure at the conference having taken place at all, but offered a reward of five hundred pounds for Uithaalder, dead or alive.
On approaching Fort Hare we were met by Lieutenant Lord Charles Hay, 2nd Queen's, one of the officers just returned with the Governor-General, and from him we learned that Kreli's "Great Place" had been burned to the ground; nearly 10,000 head of cattle, upwards of 100 horses, and 1000 goats, captured, and a great number of Kaffirs killed; a punishment the Chief would not soon forget, as the fine he had refused to pay was only 1500 head of cattle.
The following day, on our return to Fort Beaufort, by a lower road, through bush white over with the twining jessamine, we passed through acres of young locusts, a sight as extraordinary as that of their flight; the whole ground being hidden by a moving black mass of little insects about the size of a common house-fly, giving it the appearance of a burnt plain; as we moved onward, the bulk of them cleared away before us with a rustling sound, yet still so thick did they lie underfoot, that we crushed them in thousands.
At sunset we approached Beaufort by the smooth green down, over which innumerable herds of cattle were winding, whistled on by wild kaross-clad herdsmen, gun and assegais in hand, and entered the town through the Fingo Kraals, where swarthy maidens were milking their goats, saturæ capellæ; men kraaling their cattle for the night, and women of all ages—young and graceful, old and haggard, skeletons or shaking masses of fat, constantly arriving, with huge bundles of firewood balanced on their heads.
Several of the soldiers who had been wounded in the late operations, died during the hot weather, in hospital; as often as we accompanied their remains to the beautiful burying ground on the green flats outside the town, with the impressive accompaniments of a military funeral, the alternating strains of the "Dead March," and the wailing lament of the Pipes, it was impossible not to feel something unusually touching in the death of a brave man laid to his last rest so far from home and friends.
On these occasions, we invariably observed, while the crowd of Fingoes behaved with decorum and feeling, that the Totties, as we passed, displayed a malicious and gratified expression; indeed, we had it on good authority, that more than once, men and women had indulged in dancing and open rejoicing because another of the "roed batjes" (red jackets) had gone to his grave.
The head-quarter Division of the Kei expedition entered the town. The large square was filled with a host of ragged soldiers, and the streets were blocked up by bellowing thousands of cattle, while officers, out at the elbows, mounted on half starved horses; Fingoes driving oxen laden with dagha; and camp followers leading pack-horses covered with blankets, raw meat, and jingling kettles, worked their way through the moving mass. All was din and confusion, for the Fingoes would not go to their kraals, and the cattle had none to go to. They were afterwards sold by public auction in the centre of the town, and the proceeds divided among those who had formed the expedition.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] Cuculus Indicator.
[23] Nectarina.