Others would pass by these hills a few years later on their way inland, where the terrain flattens out into the high veldt. They were drawn to the great golden reef that, today, runs like a twin electric grid, a web of glinting light underneath the great African metropolis. They were drawn to the great hole full of bright, gleaming stones, where decades of accumulated rain water now reflect the bright, blue sky in the dark, empty earth. They were drawn, like Gandhi who carried stretchers down the hill at Spionkop, by the far-reaching hand of colonial order. They were drawn, like Churchill, also at Spionkop, with this pen and notebook, to a good story. They were drawn, like those clear-eyed boys who broke brumbies in Queensland and Victoria and New South Wales, of their own volition, eager for a chance to fight new wars and perpetuate old grudges. They left after the sieges where women and children hid deep in the earth, in shafts of precious light, sheltering in the belly of the great, glittering beast that had begun the clarion call of battle. They left after the tented camps, where rations were even more meager for those whose men were still fighting, where typhoid yellowed skin of all hues, where the Old World learned how to change the new with fences of razor wire separating one type of civilian from another.