With these it was nearly filled. Regiment upon regiment was mustered there: each drafted according to the standing of those who composed its ranks, from the Ingubu, which enjoyed the high privilege of attending as bodyguard upon the King, hence its name--the Blanket, i.e. the King's-- ever around the royal person--the fighting Imbizo, and the Induba--down to the slave regiments such as the Umcityu, composed of slaves and the descendants of conquered and therefore inferior races. All these were in full war array. The higher of them wore the _intye_, a combination of cape and headpiece made of the jetty plumage of the male ostrich, others were crowned with the _isiqoba_, a ball of feathers nodding over the forehead, and supporting the tall, pointed wing feather of the vulture, or the blue crane. Mutyas of monkey-skin and cat-tails, in some few instances leopard's skin, fantastic bunches of white cowhair at elbow and knee and ankle, with bead necklaces, varying in shape and colour, completed the adornment. But all were fully armed. The national weapon, the traditional implement of Zulu intrepidity and conquest, the broad-bladed, short-handled, close-quarter assegai--of such each warrior carried two or three: a murderous-looking battle-axe with its sickle-like blade: a heavy-headed, short-handled knob-kerrie, and the great war-shield, black, with its facings of white, a proportion white entirely--others red--others again, streaked, variegated, and surmounted by its tuft of fur or jackal's tail, or cowhair--this array, chanting in fierce strophes, stamping in unison, and clashing time with weapon-haft upon hard hide shield, amid the streaming dust, made up a picture--as terrific as it was formidable--of the ferocious and pent-up savagery of a hitherto unconquered, and in its own estimation, unconquerable race. A musky, foetid effluvium hung in the air, the mingled result of all this gathering of perspiring, moving humanity, and vast heaps of decaying bones, already decomposing in the fierce sunlight there on the killing place just outside the huge kraal at its eastern end, where a great number of the King's cattle had been slaughtered on the previous day in order to feast the regiments mustered for war--while myriads of buzzing flies combined to render the surcharged atmosphere doubly pestilential. Seated together, in a group apart, the principal indunas of the nation were gathered in earnest conference, while, further on, the whole company of _izanusi_, or war-doctors, arrayed in the hideous and disgusting trappings of their order, were giving a final eye to the removal of huge _mutt_ bowls, containing some concoction equally hideous and disgusting, from the secluded and mysterious precincts wherein such had been brewed: for the whole army was about to be doctored for war.