Diamond Mines: Pioneer Advance Page 142



	104 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA On came the impis in raging masses that dashed on every side of the laager like surf on a reef, wrenching at the wheels, clambering over the canvas, plunging through the thorns. The heavy wagons were shaken and swayed, but the lashed barricade held fast. The grim Boers met the shock with withering volleys, piling up the blacks in bloody heaps around the laager. Crouching behind the firing line, the women moulded bullets and helped to reload. The firing was so deadly and the laager so impenetrable that the surges massed against it recoiled. But, after a moment of rallying,on came the billows of men, flinging their assagais, and howling like madmen as they crashed against the barrier which shielded the Boers. They stabbed and slashed at the canvas covers in frenzied efforts to cut their way over the wagons, and wriggled through the crevices packed with thorn bushes, until some, torn, bloody, and gasping, squirmed into the square, where the Boer women killed them with knives and hatchets. The Boers fired as fast as they could lift their rifles, not stopping to use their ramrods, but grabbing handfuls of powder to charge their guns, and dropping in slugs with scarcely any wadding. So intense was the strain of that hour that even these men of iron nerve were entranced. " Of that fight," wrote one, " nothing remains in my memory except shouting and tumult and lamentation, and a dense smoke that rose straight as a plumb line upwards from the ground." ¹ Four times the black impis charged and four times their onset was beaten back before Umsilikazi drew off his men. The field around the laager was a fearful sight, and the white tops of the barricade were slashed into strips and dripping with blood. Seventy-two stabs were counted in the cover of one wagon, and eleven hundred and seventy-two assagais were flung through into the camp. But none of the stout defenders were killed, and all joined devoutly in a psalm of thanksgiving. In retaliation for this attack Hendrik Potgieter and Pieter Uys led a troop of one hundred and thirty-seven in a swift ¹ "Annals of Natal," p. 375.