The effect was electrical, since our attackers had never seen anything of the kind before.  For a while they all drew off, which gave me time to reload.  Then they came on again and I repeated the process.  For a second time they retreated and after consultation which lasted for a minute or more, made a third attack.  Once more I saluted them to the best of my ability, though on this occasion only three men and a horse fell.  The fifth shot was a clean miss because they came on in such a scattered formation that I had to turn from side to side to fire.

Now at last the game was up, for the simple reason that I had no more cartridges save two in my double-barrelled pistol.  It may be asked why.  The answer is, want of foresight.  Too many cartridges in one’s pocket are apt to chafe on camel-back and so is a belt full of them.  In those days also the engagements were few in which a man fired over fifteen.  I had forty or fifty more in a bag, which bag Savage with his usual politeness had taken and hung upon his saddle without saying a word to me.  At the beginning of the action I found this out, but could not then get them from him as he was separated from me.  Hans, always careless in small matters, was really to blame as he ought to have seen that I had the cartridges, or at any rate to have carried them himself.  In short, it was one of those accidents that will happen.  There is nothing more to be said.

After a still longer consultation our enemies advanced on us for the fourth time, but very slowly.  Meanwhile I had been taking stock of the position.  The camel corps, or what was left of it, oblivious of our plight which the dust of conflict had hidden from them, was travelling on to the north, more or less victorious.  That is to say, it had cut its way through the Black Kendah and was escaping unpursued, huddled up in a mob with the baggage animals safe in its centre.  The Black Kendah themselves were engaged in killing our wounded and succouring their own; also in collecting the bodies of the dead.  In short, quite unintentionally, we were deserted.  Probably, if anybody thought about us at all in the turmoil of desperate battle, they concluded that we were among the slain.

Marut came up to me, unhurt, still smiling and waving a bloody spear.

“Lord Macumazana,” he said, “the end is at hand.  The Child has saved the others, or most of them, but us it has abandoned.  Now what will you do?  Kill yourself, or if that does not please you, suffer me to kill you?  Or shoot on until you must surrender?”

“I have nothing to shoot with any more,” I answered.  “But if we surrender, what will happen to us?”

“We shall be taken to Simba’s town and there sacrificed to the devil Jana—­I have not time to tell you how.  Therefore I propose to kill myself.”

“Then I think you are foolish, Marut, since once we are dead, we are dead; but while we are alive it is always possible that we may escape from Jana.  If the worst comes to the worst I have a pistol with two bullets in it, one for you and one for me.”