For some hundreds of yards I rode on thus recklessly, because recklessness seemed my only chance.  Thrice I met bodies of Zulus, but on each occasion they scattered before me, calling out words that I could not catch.  It was as though they were frightened of something they saw about me.  Perhaps they thought that I was mad to ride thus among them.  Indeed I must have looked mad, or perhaps there was something else.  At any rate I believed that I was going to win right through them when an accident happened.

A bullet struck my mare somewhere in the back.  I don’t know where it came from, but as I saw no Zulu shoot, I think it must have been one fired by a soldier who was still fighting on the slopes of the mount.  The effect of it was to make the poor beast quite ungovernable.  Round she wheeled and galloped at headlong speed back towards the peak, leaping over dead and dying and breaking through the living as she went.  In two minutes we were rushing up its northern flank, which seemed to be quite untenanted, towards the sheer brown cliff which rose above it, for the fighting was in progress on the other side.  Suddenly at the foot of this cliff the mare stopped, shivered and sank down dead, probably from internal bleeding.

I looked about me desperately.  To attempt the plain on foot meant death.  What then was I to do?  Glancing at the cliff I saw that there was a gully in it worn by thousands of years of rainfall, in which grew scanty bushes.  Into this I ran, and finding it practicable though difficult, began to climb upwards, quite unnoticed by the Zulus who were all employed upon the further side.  The end of it was that I reached the very crest of the mount, a patch of bare, brown rock, except at one spot on its southern front where there was a little hollow in which at this rainy season of the year herbage and ferns grew in the accumulated soil, also a few stunted, aloe-like plants.

Into this patch I crept, having first slaked my thirst from a little pool of rain water that lay in a cup-like depression of the rock, which tasted more delicious than any nectar, and seemed to give me new life.  Then covering myself as well as I could with grasses and dried leaves from the aloe plants, I lay still.

Now I was right on the brink of the cliff and had the best view of the Isandhlwana plain and the surrounding country that can be imagined.  From my lofty eyrie some hundreds of feet in the air, I could see everything that happened beneath.  Thus I witnessed the destruction of the last of the soldiers on the slopes below.  They made a gallant end, so gallant that I was proud to be of the same blood with them.  One fine young fellow escaped up the peak and reached a plateau about fifty feet beneath me.  He was followed by a number of Zulus, but took refuge in a little cave whence he shot three or four of them; then his cartridges were exhausted and I heard the savages speaking in praise of him—­dead.  I think he was the last to die on the field of Isandhlwana.