At last torpor, or weakness, overcame me, and I fell into a kind of net of bad dreams which, thank Heaven! I have now forgotten.

Yet when certain events happened subsequently I always thought, and indeed still think, that these or something like them, had been a part of those evil dreams.
On the morning following this conversation I was at length allowed to be carried to the stoep, where they laid me down, wrapped in a very dirty blanket, upon a rimpi-strung bench or primitive sofa.

When I had satisfied my first delight at seeing the sun and breathing the fresh air, I began to study my surroundings.

In front of the house, or what remained of it, so arranged that the last of them at either end we made fast to the extremities of the stoep, was arranged an arc of wagons, placed as they are in a laager and protected underneath by earth thrown up in a mound and by boughs of the mimosa thorn.

Evidently these wagons, in which the guard of Boers and armed natives who still remained on the place slept at night, were set thus as a defence against a possible attack by the Quabies or other Kaffirs.
During the daytime, however, the centre wagon was drawn a little on one side to leave a kind of gate.