However, at the time he always hoped that French might have reached some place of safety on the river and be alive. So Selous continued to hunt for elephants until one day "Boy," French's gun-bearer, crawled into camp and gave an account of his master's death. It appeared that after hunting for days in the bush in the wrong direction poor French collapsed, and as he was dying wrote on his rifle the words "I cannot go any further; when I die, peace with all." French's two boys, "Boy" and "Nangora," then walked all night and struck the river at Linyanti. "For several nights," says Selous, "I never slept, as the vision of my lost friend wandering about and dying by inches continually haunted me." Seriously ill as he was, Selous then went to Linyanti, hoping to recover the body of his friend and give it decent burial, and Mamele promised to send all his people out to look for it when the rains came, but it was never found. Selous himself was so depressed in mind and worn with fever that he did not care to hunt any longer on the Chobe, so made for his waggons, which he reached on October 11th, where he found Sell dangerously ill. Miller, too, was attacked with malaria but soon recovered. It was now necessary to wait for the rains, but as they did not come Selous, tired of shooting wildebeest and zebra on the Mababe flats, once more returned to the Chobe to look for elephants. He went as far as Maimi's town, and as the rain was now threatening he retraced his steps. By the middle of November he again reached the waggons, and the much desired rains at last fell. The party got to the Botletlie with ease, but between that river and Bamangwato the oxen again suffered terribly and were nearly lost owing to thirst. Later, in December, Selous reached the Diamond Fields, and was there attacked by a low fever which nearly cost him his life; in fact, nothing but the unremitting attention and care of his friends, Mrs. Frederick Barber and her daughter, Mrs. Alexander Baillie, rescued him from death. Meanwhile, owing to political blunders, South Africa and all its white and black races were in a ferment, and the Zulu War in full progress. The usual cause of England's wars with savages was acts of rapine or insolence on the part of natives living in wild country where the black or red man predominated in numbers and a small white population was threatened with danger. No such reason, however, was the cause of the Zulu war in 1879. Since 1861 the Natal colonists had lived alongside the Zulus in perfect amity, and the colonists "felt no real alarm concerning the Zulus until the idea was suggested to them by those in authority over them."[23]