With these effective weapons, serving both as bayonet and javelin in the hands of an athletic, sagacious, and undaunted race, who are trained from infancy to their use; combined with the musket, which they quickly learned to handle with considerable precision; and the adoption of just as much of military tactics and system (acquired from the Cape Corps and Kaffir Police deserters), as improved without hampering their skirmishing mode of bush-fighting; added to a marvellous concert and unity in their movements, the Kaffirs were a most formidable foe even to the flower of the British troops, who had to encounter and storm them in their own natural fortresses, rendered almost inaccessible by the dense bush of impenetrable thorns, &c.; too succulent to be burnt, yet affording to the crawling native, the opportunity of lurking in unexpected ambuscade at every point. Such fearful odds against so comparative a handful of troops, not to mention the excessive hardships, privations, and vicissitudes of climate, render it less a matter of surprise that complete success was for a time delayed, than that it was ever ultimately achieved. [Illustration: KAFFIR.] FOOTNOTES: [15] See Ayliff's Vocabulary. [16] Cussonia Thyrsiflora. CHAPTER IX. NIGHT ATTACK ON CAMP.--POST RETIEF. On the night of the 20th, the Kaffirs who, since their unsuccessful raid, had been constantly hovering about in small parties on the hill sides, watching our cattle and our movements, treated us at midnight with a volley into the middle of our encampment, which woke us suddenly from our first sleep; the bugles sounded the "assembly," and we had to tumble out of bed. As I groped about in the dark for my clothes, I felt a peculiar sensation of unprotectedness, in my night-shirt, as the balls whistled past the tent, not having been under fire before in that costume; something of the same sort of feeling prompted B----r, on a later occasion, in crossing the enemy's line of fire, to pull his jacket collar up on the exposed side of his face as a protection. After several frantic attempts to unhook my tent door, tightly contracted by the dew, I had to crawl out below, and found the men drawn up on their own lines as if they had been there all night. A few shots were fired from the river bank, which however did no harm, and were silenced by the sentries without our aid; the skulking thieves, frightened at the hornet's nest they had disturbed, taking themselves off at once. In five minutes after we were dismissed, the camp was still as death, and in the morning I felt uncertain, on first waking, whether the whole had not been a dream.