The 45th opened fire to prevent the enemy’s skirmishers doing damage; and
a few pioneers of the 45th were sent up with axes to force open the gate.
In the mean time, however, the men of the 33d, upon the road leading up to
the gate, discovered a spot half-way up, by which they were able to
scramble up to the left, and, getting through the hedge, they quickly
cleared away the defenders of the gate. A large portion of the regiment
entered at this spot, the gate not being fairly opened for a quarter of an
hour after the storming-party arrived at it; for when it was broken down,
it was found that the gate-house was filled with very large stones; and
therefore, had powder been at hand, and the gate been blown in, a
considerable time must have elapsed before the party could have entered.
Behind the gateway were a cluster of huts, many of whose inhabitants still
remained in them in spite of the heavy fire which had for two hours been
kept up. Behind them was a natural scarp of twenty-five or thirty feet
high, with a flight of steps wide enough only for a single man to ascend
at a time. At the top of this was another gate, which had been blown open
by the rifles of the 33d. I entered with the rear of the regiment; but all
was by that time over. By the first gateway were six or seven bodies, and
two or three men by the second. Beyond this was the level plateau, thickly
scattered with the native huts of their ordinary construction—not the
haycock-fabrics which had covered the other hills and plateau. At a
hundred yards from the gate lay the body of Theodore himself, pierced with
three balls, one of which, it is said, he fired with his own hand. He was
of middle height and very thin, and the expression of his face in death
was mild rather than the reverse. He had thrown-off the rich robe in which
he had ridden over the plain, and was in an ordinary chief’s red-and-white
cloth.
The fighting was now over. A hundred men or so had escaped down a path
upon the other side of the fortress, and the rest of the defenders had
fled into their houses, and emerged as peaceable inhabitants without their
weapons. Nothing could be more admirable than the behaviour of the 33d. I
did not see a single instance of a man either of this or of the regiment
which followed attempting to take a single ornament or other article from
the person of any of the natives. These latter thronged out of their
houses, bearing their household goods, and salaaming to the ground, as
they made their way towards the gate of the fort. I went into several of
the abandoned huts; they contained nothing but rubbish. A few goats and
cattle stood in the enclosures, and bags of grain were in plenty. The poor
people had been well content to escape with their lives, and with what
they could carry away on their own shoulders and those of their
pack-animals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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