Note Back to Main Text — Chapter VII

Talana Hill, situated about 5,000 yards east of the British camp, from which it was separated by the wire-intersected environs of Dundee and by the sunken bed of the Sand Spruit, was peculiarly adapted for defence. From the summit a precipitous rocky face dropped on the Dundee side to a nearly flat terrace, 160 feet below it, whose fifty to eighty yards of width were commanded throughout by the boulder-strewn brow of the mountain. A low stone wall bounded this terrace at its outer edge, immediately below which the hillside again fell suddenly, affording from ten to fifteen yards of ground dead to the crest directly above it, but vulnerable to fire, both from Lennox Hill, a slightly higher eminence on the other side of a Nek to the south-east, and from a salient protruding from the northern extremity of the hill. From the wall bounding the upper terrace, however, other walls, running downhill, intersected this face of the mountain at right angles, and served as low traverses affording some protection from flanking fire. These formed the enclosures of Smith's farm, a group of tree-encircled buildings around an open space at the base of the mountain, near its centre, and some 400 feet below its summit. Below, and on either side of the homestead stood copses of eucalyptus trees, which, roughly in all some 500 yards square, occupied the top of the glacis whose base was the Sand Spruit, which 800 yards of bare and open grassland separated from the edge of the wood.[91]