for close fighting.  Assegais, you know.  That’s the name of it.  Only the eyes.  Creeping, creeping, creeping.  No noise.  One raised.  Waggons drawn up in laager.  Oxen out-spanned in the middle.  Trekking all day.  Tired out; dog tired.  Crawl, crawl, crawl!  Hands and knees.  Might be snakes.  A wriggle.  Men sitting about the camp fire.  Smoking.  Gleam of their eyes!  Under the waggons.  Nearer, nearer, nearer!  Then, the throwing ones in your midst.  Shower of ’em.  Right and left.  ‘Halloa! stand by, boys!’ Look up; see ’em swarming, black like ants, over the waggons.  Inside the laager.  Snatch up rifles!  All up!  Oxen stampeding, men running, blacks sticking ’em like pigs in the back with their assegais.  Bad job, the whole thing.  Don’t care for it, myself.  Very tough ’uns to fight.  If they once break laager.”

“Then you should never let them get to close quarters,” I suggested, catching the general drift of his inarticulate swift pictures.

“You’re a square man, you are, Doctor!  There you touch the spot.  Never let ’em get at close quarters.  Sentries?—­creep past ’em.  Outposts?—­crawl between.  Had Forbes and Wilson like that.  Cut ’em off.  Per-dition! . . .  But Maxims will do it!  Maxims!  Never let em get near.  Sweep the ground all round.  Durned hard, though, to know just when they’re coming.  A night; two nights; all clear; only waste ammunition.  Third, they swarm like bees; break laager; all over!”

This was not exactly an agreeable picture of what we had to expect—­ the more so as our particular laager happened to have no Maxims.  However, we kept a sharp lookout for those gleaming eyes in the long grass of which Colebrook warned us; their flashing light was the one thing to be seen, at night above all, when the black bodies could crawl unperceived through the tall dry herbage.  On our first night out we had no adventures.  We watched by turns outside, relieving sentry from time to time, while those of us who slept within the laager slept on the bare ground with our arms beside us.  Nobody spoke much.  The tension was too great.  Every moment we expected an attack of the enemy.

Next day news reached us by scouts from all the other laagers.  None of them had been attacked; but in all there was a deep, half-instinctive belief that the Matabele in force were drawing step by step closer and closer around us.  Lo-Bengula’s old impis, or native regiments, had gathered together once more under their own indunas—­men trained and drilled in all the arts and ruses of savage warfare.  On their own ground, and among their native scrub, those rude strategists are formidable.  They know the country, and how to fight in it.  We had nothing to oppose to them but a handful of the new Matabeleland police, an old regular soldier or two, and a raw crowd of volunteers, most of whom, like myself, had never before really handled a rifle.