Behind us stretched bushland, or rather broken land, where mimosa thorns grew in scattered groups, sloping down to the banks of the Tugela about four miles away.
Shortly after dawn I was roused from the place where I slept, wrapped up in some blankets, under a mimosa tree--for, of course, we had no tents--by a messenger, who said that the Prince Umbelazi and the white man, John Dunn, wished to see me.

I rose and tidied myself as best I could, since, if I can avoid it, I never like to appear before natives in a dishevelled condition.

I remember that I had just finished brushing my hair when Umbelazi arrived.
I can see him now, looking a veritable giant in that morning mist.
Indeed, there was something quite unearthly about his appearance as he arose out of those rolling vapours, such light as there was being concentrated upon the blade of his big spear, which was well known as the broadest carried by any warrior in Zululand, and a copper torque he wore about his throat.
There he stood, rolling his eyes and hugging his kaross around him because of the cold, and something in his anxious, indeterminate expression told me at once that he knew himself to be a man in terrible danger.

Just behind him, dark and brooding, his arms folded on his breast, his eyes fixed upon the ground, looking, to my moved imagination, like an evil genius, stood the stately and graceful Saduko.
On his left was a young and sturdy white man carrying a rifle and smoking a pipe, whom I guessed to be John Dunn, a gentleman whom, as it chanced, I had never met, while behind were a force of Natal Government Zulus, clad in some kind of uniform and armed with guns, and with them a number of natives, also from Natal--"kraal Kafirs," who carried stabbing assegais.

One of these led John Dunn's horse.
Of those Government men there may have been thirty or forty, and of the "kraal Kafirs" anything between two and three hundred.
I shook Umbelazi's hand and gave him good-day.
"That is an ill day upon which no sun shines, O Macumazana," he answered--words that struck me as ominous.