They Are Illegitimate Children Of No Line,
Abandoned Broadcast Over The Country, With No Family Likeness And No
Home.
They stand alone, or shoulder to shoulder, or at right angles,
or at a tangent, or join hands across a valley.
They never appear
the same; some run to a sharp point, some stretch out, forming a
table-land, others are gigantic ant-hills, others perfect and
accurately modelled ramparts. In a ride of half a mile, every hill
completely loses its original aspect and character.
They hide each other, or disguise each other. Each can be enfiladed
by the other, and not one gives up the secret of its strategic value
until its crest has been carried by the bayonet. To add to this
confusion, the river Tugela has selected the hills around Ladysmith
as occupying the country through which it will endeavor to throw off
its pursuers. It darts through them as though striving to escape, it
doubles on its tracks, it sinks out of sight between them, and in the
open plain rises to the dignity of water-falls. It runs uphill, and
remains motionless on an incline, and on the level ground twists and
turns so frequently that when one says he has crossed the Tugela, he
means he has crossed it once at a drift, once at the wrecked railroad
bridge, and once over a pontoon. And then he is not sure that he is
not still on the same side from which he started.
Some of these hills are green, but the greater part are a yellow or
dark red, against which at two hundred yards a man in khaki is
indistinguishable from the rocks around him.
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