When the sun went down the night became bitterly cold, so lighting a large wood fire, we sat round its crackling flames, which threw a lurid glare on as motley a group as that cave had ever held within its walls. White and black, male and female, horses and dogs. There we might have been seen, clustered all night round the embers of the dying fire, dozing and “dreaming” anything but “the happy hours away.” At early dawn, all shivering and shaking, hungry and tired, we began our return to Captain Allison’s, where our native servants, not knowing what had become of us, were overjoyed on our arrival. [Illustration: FALLS OF THE UMGENI, HOWICK, NEAR PIETERMARITZBURG. ] From the place where we were outspanned we could see standing out in bold relief some few miles away the magnificent panorama of the Drakensberg range, the white silver streak of the Tugela dashing down the mighty cliffs and dark, buttressed precipices in front, breaking into “snow-white foam, leaping from rock to rock like the mountain chamois,” and in the far distance, filling up the background of the picture, the towering crests 10,000 feet high, of Champagne Castle and Giant’s Castle, the highest summits of the range. Resting a day and enjoying the inspection of Captain Allison’s stock, admiring his horses, trying their speed and jumping powers in hurdle-racing over the _veldt_, and indulging in a little long-range rifle practice, I made all arrangements to leave my wife at the foot of the mountain, ascend and see the falls from the plateau, which, although extending far backward into the Free State, is terminated so abruptly in front by the precipitous cliffs of the ever-frowning Drakensberg. Captain Hill being taken suddenly unwell, I started with three of the guides who had previously accompanied me to the Cannibal caves and some of my own “boys.” Climbing over a spur of the Drakensberg at Olivier’s Hock, I struck a lovely valley on the south side of a branch of the Eland’s River; but as the water was low at the time I was able to follow its meanderings for several miles. Jumping from boulder to boulder over the water holes in its course, I ascended the rocky bed of what was then a simple, gentle stream flowing along with quiet delight and singing the same old song to which generations (for this country had once been thickly populated) long since dead and gone had listened.