Hill—­both Boer positions having guns of long range mounted on them; and at the same time Transvaalers, mostly Heidelberg men, had gained a footing on the eastern end of the same ridge where boulders in Titanic masses, matted together by roots of mimosa trees, rise cliff-like from the plain where Klip River, emerging from thorny thickets, bends northward to loop miles of fertile meadow-land before flowing back into the narrow gorge past Intombi Spruit Camp.  How the Boers got there one can only imagine, for neither the Imperial Light Horse pickets on Waggon Hill, nor the Manchesters holding the very verge of that cliff which we call Caesar’s Camp and the Kaffirs Intombi, nor the mixed force of volunteers and police watching the scrub lower down, saw any form or heard a movement during the night.  It was intensely dark for two or three hours, but in that still air a steenbok’s light leap from rock to rock would have struck sharply on listening ears.  Those on picket duty aver that not a Boer could have shown himself or passed through the mimosa scrub without being challenged.  Yet four or five hundred of them got to the jutting crest, of Caesar’s Camp somehow, and to reach it they must either have crossed open ground or climbed with silent caution up the boulder-roughened steeps.

An explanation may perhaps be found in the fact that a Boer takes off his boots or vel-schoon when there is noiseless stalking to be done.  Going over the battlefield afterwards I noticed that where dead Boers were lying thickest about the salient angle of that eastern space, all were bare-footed.  Boots and even rubber-soled canvas shoes had been taken off for the climb, and these lay in pairs beside the bodies, just as they had been placed when the fight began.  And the spots on which these Boers lay seemed to indicate that they must have scaled the steep just where a sentry among the rocks on top would have found most difficulty in seeing anything as he peered over jutting edges into the darkness below.  At any rate the Manchester picket was surprised before dawn, as I shall describe presently, though it should have been put on the alert by rifle firing an hour earlier away on Waggon Hill, where the fight began between two and three o’clock.  Then, however, it seemed little more than the sniping between outposts, to which custom has made all of us somewhat inattentive, and nobody thought for a moment that a picket of Imperial Light Horse had been practically cut off before the Boers fired a shot or our own men had given an alarm.

Waggon Hill was at that moment the key of a very critical situation, and had the Light Horse been seized by panic, or given way an inch, the Boers might possibly have brought enormous numbers up to that commanding crest and enfiladed the rear of Caesar’s Camp.  We know now that thousands of Free Staters were waiting in the kloofs between Mounted Infantry Hill and Middle Hill, not two miles distant, for the opportunity which,