tion>Bertram Mitford
The Triumph of Hilary Blachland
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4064066208363
Table of Contents
"The Triumph of Hilary Blachland"
"The Triumph of Hilary Blachland"
Chapter One.
The Camp on the Matya’mhlope.
“There! That is Umzilikazi’s grave,” said Christian Sybrandt, pointing out a towering pile of rocks some little way off, across the valley.
“Is it? Let’s go and have a look at it then,” was the prompt reply. But immediately upon having made it, the second speaker knew that he had spoken like a fool, for the first gave a short laugh.
“Go over and have a look at it?” he echoed. “Why we’d all be cut to bits before we got within half a mile. It’s holy ground, man; guarded, picketed by armed majara, rigidly watched, day and night. You couldn’t get near it, no, not at any price.”
“Well, I’ve a great notion to try,” persisted the other, to the imaginative side of whose temperament the place of sepulture of that remarkable savage, the remorseless, all-destroying war-leader, the founder and consolidator of a martial nation, irresistibly appealed, no less than the mystery and peril enshrouding the undertaking did to the adventurous side. “No white man has ever seen it close, I think you said, Sybrandt?”
“That’s so. And you won’t constitute the exception, Blachland. You’ll never get there; and, if you did, you’d never get away.”
“Yet it would be interesting to constitute that exception,” persisted the other. “I like doing things that nobody else has done.”
“Well, even if you escaped the five hundred to one chances against you, you wouldn’t have the satisfaction of talking about it—not as long as you are in this country, at all events; for let even so much
