It was well said: “The field of Isandhlwana is beginning to give up its secrets; the mists of fiction are being dispersed by the dry light of fact. It has not been through mere idle curiosity that there has been a desire to know what passed during the final moments of that fatal struggle. There were difficulties to be explained, reputations to be cleared, allegations to be contradicted. There was the desire to know how those who were lost had died. To be sure that they died with their faces to the foe; to be satisfied that their death was not attended with any excess of cruelty or suffering. And there can be little doubt that it is the very anxiety to be assured of all this that stands responsible for the numerous fictions—as we must now hold them to be—which have been circulated with regard to what passed on that memorable day.”—_Natal Witness_, 29th May, 1879. A short description of the spot, taken from that written by Mr. Archibald Forbes, may be of interest: At the top of the ascent beyond the Bashi we saw, on our left front, rising above the surrounding country, the steep, isolated, and almost inaccessible hill, or rather crag, of Isandhlwana; the contour of its rugged crest strangely resembling a side view of a couchant lion. On the lower neck of the high ground on its right were clearly visible up against the sky-line the abandoned waggons of the destroyed column. Now we crossed the rocky bed of the little stream and were cantering up the slope leading to the crest on which were the waggons, and already tokens of the combat and bootless flight were apparent. The line of retreat towards Fugitives’ Drift, along which, through a gap in the Zulu environment, our unfortunate comrades who thus far survived tried to escape, lay athwart a rocky slope to our right front, with a precipitous ravine at its base. In this ravine dead men lay thick. All the way up the slope could be traced the fitful line of flight. Most of the dead here were 24th men; single bodies and groups where they seemed to have gathered to make a hopeless gallant stand and die. On the edge of a gully was a gun-limber jammed, its horses hanging in their harness down the steep face of the ravine; a little farther on a broken ambulance-waggon, with its team of mules dead in their harness, and around were the bodies of the poor fellows who had been dragged from the intercepted vehicle. Following the trail of bodies through long grass and scattered stores, the crest was reached. Here the dead lay thick, many in the uniform of the Natal Mounted Police. On the bare ground on the crest itself, among the waggons, the dead were less thick; but on the slope beyond, on which from the crest we looked down, the scene was the saddest and more full of weird desolation than any I had yet gazed upon. There was none of the horror of a recent battle-field; nothing of all that makes the scene of yesterday’s battle so rampantly ghastly shocked the senses.