Being lifted above the ranks upon my horse I could see the whole advance, and the general aspect of it was that of a triple black wave, each wave crowned with foam--the white plumes and shields of the Amawombe were the foam--and alive with sparkles of light--their broad spears were the light.
We were charging now--and oh! the awful and glorious excitement of that charge! Oh, the rush of the bending plumes and the dull thudding of eight thousand feet! The Usutu came up the slope to meet us.

In silence we went, and in silence they came.

We drew near to each other.

Now we could see their faces peering over the tops of their mottled shields, and now we could see their fierce and rolling eyes.
Then a roar--a rolling roar such as at that time I had never heard: the thunder of the roar of the meeting shields--and a flash--a swift, simultaneous flash, the flash of the lightning of the stabbing spears.
Up went the cry of: _"Kill, Amawombe, kill!"_ answered by another cry of: _"Toss, Usutu, toss!"_ After that, what happened?
Heaven knows alone--or at least I do not.
But in later years Mr.Osborn, afterwards the resident magistrate at Newcastle, in Natal, who, being young and foolish in those days, had swum his horse over the Tugela and hidden in a little kopje quite near to us in order to see the battle, told me that it looked as though some huge breaker--that breaker being the splendid Amawombe--rolling in towards the shore with the weight of the ocean behind it, had suddenly struck a ridge of rock and, rearing itself up, submerged and hidden it.
At least, within three minutes that Usutu regiment was no more.

We had killed them every one, and from all along our lines rose a fierce hissing sound of "S'gee, S'gee" ("Zhi" in the Zulu) uttered as the spears went home in the bodies of the conquered.
That regiment had gone, taking nearly a third of our number with it, for in such a battle as this the wounded were as good as dead.