“Vultures sit or fly there also, Hans; and I would see how they fly, that I may know when and where to shoot at them.”

“That is right, baas,” said the clever Hottentot.  “This is not like firing at geese in the Groote Kloof.  The geese go straight, like an assegai to its mark.  But the aasvogels wheel round and round, always on the turn; it is easy to miss a bird that is turning, baas.”

“Very easy.  Come on.”

Just as we were starting Vrouw Prinsloo appeared from behind the other wagon, and with her Marie, who, I noticed, was very pale and whose beautiful eyes were red, as though with weeping.

The vrouw asked me where we were going.  I told her.  After considering a little, she said that was a good thought of mine, as it was always well to study the ground before a battle.

I nodded, and led Marie aside behind some thorn trees that grew near.

“Oh!  Allan, what will be the end of this?” she asked piteously.  High as was her courage it seemed to fail her now.

“A good end, dearest,” I answered.  “We shall come out of this hole safely, as we have of many others.”

“How do you know that, Allan, which is known to God alone?”

“Because God told me, Marie,” and I repeated to her the story of the voice I had heard in my dream, which seemed to comfort her.

“Yet, yet,” she exclaimed doubtfully, “it was but a dream, Allan, and dreams are such uncertain things.  You may fail, after all.”

“Do I look like one who will fail, Marie?”

She studied me from head to foot, then answered: 

“No, you do not, although you did when you came back from the king’s huts.  Now you are quite changed.  Still, Allan, you may fail, and then—­what?  Some of those dreadful Zulus have been here while you were sleeping, bidding us all make ready to go to the Hill of Death.  They say that Dingaan is in earnest.  If you do not kill the vultures, he will kill us.  It seems that they are sacred birds, and if they escape he will think he has nothing to fear from the white men and their magic, and so will make a beginning by butchering us.  I mean the rest of us, for I am to be kept alive, and oh! what shall I do, Allan?”

I looked at her, and she looked at me.  Then I took the double-barrelled pistol out of my pocket and gave it to her.

“It is loaded and on the half-cock,” I said.

She nodded, and hid it in her dress beneath her apron.  Then without more words we kissed and parted, for both of us feared to prolong that scene.

The hill Hloma Amabutu was quite close to our encampment and the huts of the Reverend Mr. Owen, scarcely a quarter of a mile off, I should say, rising from the flat veld on the further side of a little depression that hardly amounted to a valley.  As we approached it I noticed its peculiar and blasted appearance, for whereas all around the grass was vivid with the green of spring, on this place none seemed to grow.  An eminence strewn with tumbled heaps of blackish rock, and among them a few struggling, dark-leaved bushes; that was its appearance.  Moreover, many of these boulders looked as though they had been splashed and lined with whitewash, showing that they were the resting-place of hundreds of gorged vultures.