Editorial note — THE RAINBOW, LIGHTNING, AND ECLIPSES

The earthquake referred to took place in 1883, during the night which preceded Cetshwayo’s defeat by Usibebu at Ulundi. My sister (Mrs. Faye) and I were camped out some ten miles from Melmoth, when, about midnight, the wagonette in which we were sleeping was shaken and began to move down hill, but was fortunately stopped after a few yards by a block of wood lying in the grass. The natives who were near us exclaimed that it meant a calamity to the Zulu nation. And in the morning, when we got down from the wagonette, we found a great number of men sitting about looking sad, with their arms over their shoulders (meaning “we are lost”). They told us that Cetshwayo had been killed by Usibebu; in fact, the latter had made a clean sweep of the royal kraal and all the king’s men. In less than an hour later we saw numbers of people, some running, some limping, some crawling past us, who had just managed to escape with their lives. Cetshwayo, wounded badly in the leg, was saved, and taken for protection to Eshowe, where he died early in the following year. (See Mr. Gibson’s The Story of the Zulus, p. 256, new edition.)