The new light distorted distance, made the high ground seem remote and
no longer hostile. A flight of egrets flew in long formation above the
course of the river, high enough to catch the sun so that they were
birds of bright, glowing gold in a world of shadow. And the dawn
brought with it a small cold wind whose voice in the grass blended with
the murmur of the river.
Then the sun hit the heights as though to bless the army of the
Republic. The mist in the gullies writhed in agony at its warmth,
lifted into the wind and smeared away.
The rim of the sun pushed up over the edge of the land, and the day
came bright and clean with dew.
Through his glasses Sean studied the crest of the high ground.
At a hundred paces there were traces of smoke as the Boer Army brewed
coffee.
'You think they'll spot us?' asked Saul.
Sean shook his head without lowering his glasses. Two small.
bushes and the thin screen of grass they had constructed during the
night hid them effectively.
'Are you sure you are all right?' Saul asked once more.
From the set of his face Sean seemed to be in pain.
-Stomach gripes,' Sean grunted. Let it start soon, please let It
start. The waiting is the worst.
Then the ground trembled under his chest, the faintest vibration, and
Sean felt relief flood through him. 'Here come the guns,' he said, and
using the cover of one of the bushes, he stood up and looked behind
him.
In a single column, following each other at strictly spaced intervals,
the guns were moving into action. They were coming in fast, still tiny
with distance but growing as the gunners astride the lead horses of
each team urged them on. Closer now so that Sean could see the whip
arms rising and falling, he heard the rumble and rattle of the
carriages and faintly the shouts of the outriders.
Sixteen guns, one hundred and fifty horses to drag them, and a hundred
men to serve them. But in the vastness of the great plain before
Colenso the column seemed small and insignificant. Sean looked beyond
them and saw the foot soldiers following them, line upon line, like the
poles of a fence, thousands of them creeping forward across the plain.
Sean felt the old wild elation begin. He knew the army was cent red up
on the line of markers which he and Saul had laid early the previous
night, and that the two of them would be the first across the bridge
the first of all those thousands.
But it was elation of a different quality to anything he had
experienced before. It was sharper and more poignant, seasoned by the
red pepper of his fear. So that for the first time in his life Sean
learned that fear can be a pleasurable sensation.
He watched the patterns of men and guns evolve upon the brown
gaming-table-counters thrown down at chance, to be won or irretrievably
lost at the fall of the dice of war. Knowing also that he was one of
the counters, afraid and strangely jubilant in this knowledge.
