“Very well, Beresford,” replied Sir Sam; “I want you to get over as quickly as may be; but you’d better make a bit of a detour to the rear before you cross the valley. By crossing below the bend you’ll avoid most of the fire that is sweeping the direct way across.” “All right, sir,” said Bill, with a wink of the eye on the chief’s off side that seemed to say, “I think I see myself detouring.” He took his sword-belt in a couple of holes and started. To begin with, he had to clamber into the valley down the face of an all but perpendicular precipice, on the projections of which the Afghan shells were striking with malign freedom. Looking down from the upper edge I watched him complete the descent, and then start on the dangerous journey across the valley. No doubt he was making good speed; but it looked to me, anxious as I was, as if he were sauntering. Now and then he was hidden altogether by the smoke and dust of an exploding shell. Cool hand he was, to be sure! When he reached the hither bank of the Khyber stream, he deliberately sat himself down on a stone, and unlaced his boots, took them and his stockings off, and waded the stream barefoot. Having crossed, he sat down and replaced these articles of attire--how abominably particular he seemed, sitting right in the fair-way of that belch of fire, about the correct lacing of his ankle boots! Finally he lit a cigarette, resumed his tramp across the rest of the valley, and clambering up the rocks bounding its farther side, disappeared among Appleyard’s red-coats. That officer was already committed to an attack, so Bill remained with his force and took part in the effort in which Birch and Swettenham went down. When Sir Sam Browne was halted in Jellalabad, and there was no chance of any further fighting that winter, Bill went back to Simla to his duties about the Viceroy. Presently I, too, tired of the inaction in the Khyber, and travelling down country to Calcutta, and voyaging across the Bay of Bengal to Rangoon, went up the Irrawaddy River into native Burmah, bound for Mandalay, the capital of King Theebaw. While “worshipping the Golden Feet” there, and investigating the eccentricities of the monarch who not long after lost his throne, a telegram came to me from London, ordering me with all speed to South Africa, where the Zulu war had broken out and where the massacre of Isandlwana had just occurred. Hard on it came a message from Bill, telling he too was off to Zululand, and proposing we should travel down there together. I wired him back a _rendezvous_ at Aden, the port at the mouth of the Red Sea whence once a month a steamer starts on the voyage along the east coast of Africa as far as Zanzibar; from which place there is connection with Port Durban in Natal by another steamer.