Having examined the horses, who were cropping all the grass within reach of them, I crept to the wall of the kraal so as to be quite out of earshot.  The night was now pitch dark, dark as it only knows how to be in Africa.  More, a thunderstorm was coming up of which that flash of sheet lightning had been a presage.  The air was electric.  From the vast bush-clad valley beneath us came a wild, moaning sound caused, I suppose, by wind among the trees, though here I felt none; far away a sudden spear of lightning stabbed the sky.  The brooding trouble of nature spread to my own heart.  I was afraid, and not of our present dangers, though these were real enough, so real that in a few hours we might all be dead.

To dangers I was accustomed; for years they had been my daily food by day and by night, and, as I think I have said elsewhere, I am a fatalist, one who knows full well that when God wants me He will take me; that is if He can want such a poor, erring creature.  Nothing that I did or left undone could postpone or hasten His summons for a moment, though of course I knew it to be my duty to fight against death and to avoid it for as long as I might, because that I should do so was a portion of His plan.  For we are all part of a great pattern, and the continuance or cessation of our lives re-acts upon other lives, and therefore life is a trust.

No, it was of greater things that I felt afraid, things terrible and imminent which I could not grasp and much less understand.  I understand them now, but who would have guessed that on the issue of that whispered colloquy in the cart behind me, depended the fate of a people and many thousands of lives?  As I was to learn in days to come, if Anscombe and Heda had determined upon heading for the Transvaal, there would, as I believe, have been no Zulu war, which in its turn meant that there would have been no Boer Rebellion and that the mysterious course of history would have been changed.

I shook myself together and returned to the cart.

“Well,” I whispered, but there was no answer.  A moment later there came another flash of lightning.

“There,” said Heda, “how many do you make it?

“Ninety-eight,” he answered.

“I counted ninety-nine,” she said, “but anyway it was within the hundred.  Mr. Quatermain, we will go to Zululand, if you please, if you will show us the way there.”

“Right,” I answered, “but might I ask what that has to do with your both counting a hundred?”

“Only this,” she said, “we could not make up our minds.  Maurice was for the Transvaal, I was for Zululand.  So you see we agreed that if another flash came before we counted a hundred, we would go to Zululand, and if it didn’t, to Pretoria.  A very good way of settling, wasn’t it?”

“Excellent!” I replied, “quite excellent for those who could think of such a thing.”