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out to one he recognized on the other side of the cordon, a comrade from the mines.
    “Mbejane! They are taking me. You must tell Nandi that if I do not see them soon they must foot it to my kraal. I will see them in the old place.”
    But Muhle never knew whether Mbejane had heard him, as the rifle of the young Boer with pale blue eyes was behind him, and he and the stolen four hundred were first walking up the hill, then running in the slow jog that is the custom in those parts. Muhle, swept along with them, looked desperately back for his wife and son, but all he could see was a mass of faces, each as frightened as his own.
    All that afternoon, the Boers made them drag heavy siege guns up to the summit of the next hill, taking the whip to those who did not comply fast enough. It soon began to rain, which made the task more difficult and the Boers bad-tempered. They did not spare the sjambok then, its tongue stinging all the more where it sizzled on wet skin. But Muhle was tough, he had worked in the hardest mines—the Ferreira, the Robinson Deep—so he did not slack from weakness. As he pulled on the chains attached to the gun carriages, he thought only of staying alive and getting back to Nandi and Wellington as soon as possible. The dark spectre crossed his mind that he would not get back, that these Boers would keep him here to fight in this white man’s war for ever—but he dismissed it, and then swore as his feet slipped in the mud.
    The scene at General Joubert’s artillery laager, to where they were pulling the guns, was a strange mixture of busyness and ghostliness. In the wake of the rain had come mist, its eerie tendrils draping the aloes and acacia trees. Through it, and all around the emplacements, moved the bullock carts and horses of the Boer burghers. At one point, Muhle caught sight of the General himself, his long beard ruffling in the breeze which, that evening, came to sweep the mist from the hills. Sitting on his horse, surveying his dispositions in the half light, he looked coolly competent: blue frock coat, brown slouch hat with a crepe band, and shrewd, piercing eyes. Muhle shivered, and saw how his own breath, like that of the General, and of the General’s horse and the stamping lines of bullocks, was making shapes in the cold air.
    They worked late into the night. The Boers brought out torches, lengths of wood soaked in pitch, and the oily yellow flame of these combined with the light of the moon to make the laager a still stranger place. As he toiled, Muhle thought of his wife and child. He was not the only one with such thoughts, for amid the sweat and groans of the four hundred men taken by the Boers came the murmurs of others concerned about their families. When, at last, the final gun was in place and the order came for the men to disband, it was as if the lid had been taken off a boiling pot. All four hundred ran pell-mell down the hill, sliding like children in the rich brown mud.
    Someone was bound to get hurt and, as the gods disposed it, it was bound to be Muhle Maseku. In the rush down to that dark valley whose small firelights signalled the place where Marwick’s column of refugees had camped for the night, he tripped and fell. No, more than that, his foot found its way into the hole made by an aardvark in the edge of an anthill and he broke his ankle. As he fell, Muhle realized that he had heard the sound many times before. It was the sound acacia branches made when you snapped them off for firewood. Then the pain tore through him and—before he could begin to cry out for help, for at least someone to fetch Nandi to him—Muhle Maseku fainted in the hills outside Ladysmith.

Five
    S tood on a blazing kopje, Henry Nevinson of the Daily Chronicle lifted his spyglass to his eye and surveyed the yellow-brown plain in the pan. Three or four miles wide, and like the town itself surrounded by hills, it was almost circular in shape. It reminded the correspondent of a shield. Not an