IN THE NGOME FOREST.
We now approach the last scenes of Florian's foreign service.
By the 13th of August the cordon of European troops and Native lines
drawn round the district in which the fugitive King of the Zulus
lurked had been drawn closer, and it was now distinctly known at
headquarters in Ulundi that he had sought refuge in the Forest of
Ngome, a wild, most savage and untrodden district between two rivers
(with long and grotesque names), tributaries of the Black Umvolosi,
and overshadowed by a mountain chain called the Ngome.
Various parties detailed for the pursuit, search, and capture failed,
till, on the 26th August, the Chief of the Staff received information
indicating where Cetewayo was certain to be found, and Major Marter,
of the King's Dragoon Guards, was ordered to proceed next day in that
direction with a squadron of his own regiment, a company of the
Native Contingent, Lonsdale's Horse, and a few Mounted Infantry, led
by Florian and another officer. The former was already suffering
from fever caught by exposure to the night dews when scouting, and
felt so weak and giddy that at times he could barely keep in his
saddle; but, full of youthful ardour and zeal, fired by the promotion
and praises he had won, he was anxious only, if life were spared him,
to see the closing act of the great campaign in South Africa.
The early morning of the 27th saw the Horse depart, the King's
Dragoon Guards leading the way, after the Mounted Infantry scouts;
and picturesque they looked in their bright scarlet tunics and white
helmets, with accoutrements glittering as they rode in Indian file
through the scenery of the tropical forest, and then for a time
debouched upon open ground.
Nodding in his saddle, Florian felt spiritless and sick at heart,
wishing intensely that the last act was over.
Far in the distance around extended a range of mountains that were
purple and blue in their hues, even against the greenish-blue of the
sky, and vast tracts of wood, tinted with every hue of green, red,
and golden; in the foreground were brawling streams dashing through
channels of rock to join the Black Umvolosi, under graceful date
palms, mimosa trees, and the undergrowth of baboon ropes and other
giant trailers. Scared troops of the eland, grey and brown herds of
fleet antelopes glided past, and more, than once the roar of a lion
made the wilderness re-echo.
And this ground had to be traversed under a fierce and burning sun
till the valley of the Ivuno River was reached, prior to which three
Dragoon Guard horses were carried off and devoured by lions.
So passed the day. The party reached a lonely little kraal on the
summit of the Nenye Mountain, and bivouacked there for the night.
Stretched on the floor of a hut, after drinking thirstily of some
weak brandy and water, Florian watched the blood-red disc of the sun,
mightier than it is ever seen in Europe, amid the luminous haze,
begin to disappear behind the verge of the vast forest--the sea of
timber--that spread below, casting forward in dark outline the quaint
and grotesque euphorbia trees that at times take the shape of Indian
idols.
Then a mist stole over the waste below, and a single star shone out
with wondrous brilliance.
Florian was so weak in the morning that he would fain have abandoned
the duty on which he had come, and remained in the hut at the kraal;
but to linger behind was only to court death by the teeth of wild
animals or the hands of scouting Zulus, so wearily he clambered,
rather than sprang as of old, into his saddle.
'Pull yourself together, if you can, my dear fellow,' said an
officer; 'our task will soon be over. It is something after a close
run to be in at the death; and it is waking men with their swords,
not dreamers with their pens, who make history.'
'I am no dreamer,' said Florian, scarcely seeing the point of the
other's remark.
'I did not mean that you were,' said the other, proffering his
cigar-case; 'have a weed?'
But Florian shook his head with an emotion of nausea.
'Forward, in single file from the right,' was the order given, for
the sun would soon be up now. Already the bees were humming loudly
among the tall reeds and giant flowers beside the stream that flowed
downward from the kraal, the forest stems looked black or bronze-like
in the grey and then crimson dawn, while the stars faded out fast.
In advancing to another kraal on the mountain, Major Marter's force
had to traverse the forest bush, where trees of giant height and
girth, matted and inter-woven by baboon ropes and other trailers,
shut out even the fierce sun of Africa, and made a cool green roof or
leafy shade, where the grass grew tall as a Grenadier, where hideous
apes barked and chattered, bright-hued parrots croaked or screamed,
and where nature seemed to have run wild in unbridled luxuriance
since the Ark rested on Ararat, and the waters of the flood subsided.
The mountains of the Ngome, and overlooking the forest of that name,
are flat-topped, like all others in South Africa; but Major Marter
found the western slope to be dangerously precipitous, and thence he
and his guides looked down into a densely wooded valley, lying more
than two thousand feet below.
About two miles distant, thin smoke could be seen ascending amid the
greenery, from a small kraal by the side of a brawling stream, and
therein Cetewayo was known to be.
As cavalry could not reach the bottom without making a very long
detour, the Major ordered all the mounted men to lay aside their
bright steel scabbards, and all other accoutrements likely to create
a rattling noise, and these, with the pack horses, were left in
charge of a small party, the command of which was offered to the
sinking Florian, who foolishly declined, and rode with the rest to a
less precipitous slope of the hills three miles distant, down which
the Dragoon Guards led their chargers by the bridle, crossed the
stream referred to, a small fence, and a marsh, and, remounting, made
a dash for the kraal, sword in hand, from the north, while the Native
Contingent formed up south of it on some open ground.
The capture of Cetewayo is an event too recent to be detailed at
length here.
It is known how his few followers, on seeing the red-coated cavalry
riding up, shouted, in unison with the Native Contingent:
'The white men are here--you are taken!'
Then the fallen royal savage came forth, looking weary, weak, and
footsore; and when a soldier--Tom Tyrrell--attempted to seize him, he
drew himself up with an air of simple dignity, and repelled him.
'Touch me not, white soldier!' he exclaimed; 'I am a King, and
surrender only to your chief.'
With their prisoner strictly guarded, the party passed the night of
the 29th August in the forest of Ngome, and Florian, as he flung
himself on the dewy grass, with fevered limbs and aching head, felt
an emotion of thankfulness that all was over, and it was nearly so
with himself now!
The moon had not yet risen; the darkness was dense around the hut
where lay Cetewayo, guarded by many a sabre and bayonet; and the
jackals and hyenas were making night hideous with their howling,
mingled at times with the yells of wild dogs.
Ever and anon the barking of baboons, as they swung themselves from
branch to branch, seemed to indicate the approach of some great beast
of prey, and the crackle of dry twigs suggested the slimy crawling of
a poisonous snake.
So passed the night in the Forest of Ngome. With dawn the trumpet
sounded 'To horse,' and again the whole party moved on the homeward
way to Ulundi. The night in the dreary forest, lying out in the
open, had done its worst for Florian. On reaching the camp he fell
from his saddle into the arms of the watchful Tom Tyrrell, and was
carried to his tent, prostrate and delirious.
Hence the tenor of the telegram received from the medical staff by
Mr. Kenneth Kippilaw.
How Florian lived to reach Durban, conveyed there with other sick in
the ambulance waggons, he never knew, so heavily was the hand of
fever laid on him; but many a time he had seen, as in a dream, the
horses straggling through bridgeless torrents, and graves dug amid
the pathless wastes for those who died on the route, and were laid
therein, rolled in their blanket, and covered up before their limbs
were cold, till at last the village of Durban--for it is little else,
though the principal seaport of Natal--was reached, and he was placed
in an extemporised hospital.
In his weakness, after the delirium passed away, he felt always as
one in a dream. The windows were open to the breeze from the Indian
Ocean, and the roar of the surf could be heard without ceasing on the
sandy beach, while at night the sharp crescent moon shone like a
silver sabre in the clear blue sky, and, laden with the perfume of
many tropical plants, the sweet air without struggled with the close
atmosphere of the crowded hospital wards, in which our 'boy soldiers
died like sick flies,' as a general officer reported.
And there he lay, hour after hour, wasted by the fever born of miasma
and the jungle, rigid and corpse-like in outline, under the light
white coverlet. For how long or how short this was to last no one
ventured to surmise.
He had ceased now to toss to and fro on his pillow and pour forth
incoherent babble, in which Revelstoke, Dulcie Carlyon, his boyish
days, and the recent stirring events of the now-ended campaign were
all strangely woven together, while Tom Tyrrell, now his constant
attendant, who nursed him tenderly as a woman would have done, had
listened with alarm and dismay. And more than once Florian had
dreamed that Tom, bearded to the eyes, bronzed to negro darkness, and
clad in an old patched regimental tunic, was not Tom at all, but
Dulcie, the girl he loved so passionately, watching there, smoothing
his pillow and holding the cup with its cooling draught to his
parched lips.
'They say that fever must run its course, sir, whatever that means,'
said Tom to the doctor.
'Ah! a fever like this is a very touch-and-go affair,' responded old
Gallipot, in whom the telegrams from headquarters and from Edinburgh
had given a peculiar interest for his patient.
'Am I dying, doctor--don't fear to tell me?' asked the latter
suddenly in a low, husky voice.
'Why do you ask, my poor fellow?' replied the doctor, bending over
him.
'I mean simply, is the end of this illness--death?'
'To tell you the truth, I greatly fear it is,' replied the doctor,
shaking his head.
'God's will be done!' said Florian resignedly. 'Well, well, perhaps
it is better so--I am so far gone--but Dulcie!' he added to himself
in a husky whisper--'poor Dulcie, alone--all alone!'
His senses had quite returned now, but he was so weak that he could
neither move hand nor foot, and his eyelids, unable to uphold their
own weight, closed as soon as raised, and often while his parched
tongue clove to the roof of his mouth as he lay thus he was supposed
to be asleep.
'Poor fellow!' he heard Tom Tyrrell whisper to an hospital orderly in
a broken voice; 'he's got his marching orders, and will soon be
off--yet he doesn't seem to suffer much.'
How hard it was to die so young, with what should have been a long
life before him, and now one with honours won to make it valuable.
Well, well, he thought, if it was God's will it would be no worse for
him than for others. It seemed as natural to die as to be born--our
place in the world is vacant before and after; but yet, again, it was
hard, he thought, to die, and die so young in a distant and barbarous
land, where the savage, the wild animal, and the Kaffir vulture would
be the only loiterers near his lonely and unmarked grave.
There came a day when the scene changed to him again. He was in the
cabin of a ship, lying near an open port-hole, through which he could
see the ocean rippling like molten gold in the setting sun, the red
light of which bathed in ruddy tints the shore of Durban and the
white lighthouse on the bluff that guards its entrance.
Anon he heard the tramp overhead of the seamen as they manned the
capstan bars and tripped merrily round to the sound of drum and fife,
heaving short on the anchor, and heaving with a will, till it was
apeak. Then, the canvas was let fall and sheeted home; the
revolution of the screw-propeller was felt to make the great
'trooper' vibrate in all her length, and the glittering waves began
to roll astern as she sped on her homeward way.
Would he live to see the end of the voyage? It seemed very
problematical.