CHAPTER XVIISUN-WASHED SPACES
A two days’ march brought them clear of the woods and into a broken country, vast, sunstrewn and silent; a beautiful desolation where the tall grass waved in the wind, and ridge and hollow, plain and mimosa tree, led the eye beyond, and beyond, to everlasting space.
Standing here alone, and listening, the only sound from all that great sunlit country was the sound of the wind in the grasses near by.
Truly this place was at the very back of the world, the hinterland of the primeval forests. Strike eastward far enough and you would sight the snow-capped crest of Kilimanjaro, King of African mountains, sitting snow-crowned above the vast territory to which he has given his name, and which stretches from Lake Eyasi to the Pare Mountains. The hunters of Kilimanjaro, which once was the home of elephants, have thinned the herds and driven them to wander. Elephants that a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, were almost fearless of man, have altered their habits from the bitter lessons they have received, and now are only to be found in the most inaccessible places. Should they cling to more inhabiteddistricts, they come out of the sheltered places only by night. A man may spend years in an elephant district without once seeing an elephant. Driven by the necessity of food and the fear of man, the great herds wander in their wonderful and mysterious journeys for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Never lying down, sleeping as they stand, always on guard, dim of sight yet keen of smell, they pass where there are trees, feeding as they go, stripping branches of leaves. Alarmed, or seeking a new feeding place, a herd moves in the rainy season, when the ground is soft, with the silence and swiftness of a cloud shadow; in the dry season when the ground is hard, the sound of them stampeding is like the drums of an army.
“Elephants,” said Berselius, pointing to some bundles of dried stuff lying near a vangueria bush. “That stuff is a bundle of bowstring hemp. They chew it and drop it. Oh, that has been dropped a long time ago; see, there you have elephants again.”
A tree standing alone showed half its bark ripped off, tusked off by some old bull elephant, and above the tusk marks, some fifteen feet up, could be seen the rubbing mark where great shoulders had scratched themselves.
As they marched, making due south, Berselius in that cold manner which never left him, and which made comradeship with the man impossible and reduced companionship to the thinnest bond, talked to Adams about the game they were after, telling in a few graphic sentences and not without feeling the wonderful story of the moving herds, to whom distance is nothing, to whom mountainsare nothing, to whom the thickest jungle is nothing. The poem of the children of the mammoth who have walked the earth with the mastodon, who have stripped the trees wherein dwelt arboreal man, who have wandered under the stars and suns of a million years, seen rivers change their courses and hills arise where plains had been, and yet remain, far strewn and thinned out, it is true, but living still. At noon they halted and the tents were pitched for a four hours’ rest.
Adams, whilst dinner was preparing, walked away by himself till the camp was hidden by a ridge, then he stood and looked around him.
Alone, like this, the spirit of the scene appeared before him: the sun, and wind, and sky; the vast, vast spaces of waving grass, broken by the beds of dried-up streams, strewn here and there with mimosas and thorns, here dim with the growth of vangueria bushes, here sharp and gray-green with cactus; this giant land, infinite, sunlit, and silent, spoke to him in a new language.
It seemed to Adams that he had never known freedom before.
A shadow swept by him on the grass. He looked up and watched the great bird that had cast the shadow sailing away on the wind, dwindling to a point, and vanishing in the dazzling blue.
CHAPTER XVIIIFAR INTO ELEPHANT LAND
They sighted a small herd of giraffe two days later, but so far off as to be beyond pursuit; but before evening, just as they were about to camp by some pools, they came across rhino.
Berselius’s quick eye spotted the beasts, a bull and a cow. They were in the open, under shelter of some thick grass; the bull was half sitting up, and his head and horn in the evening light might have been taken for the stump of a broken tree. The cow was not visible at first, but almost immediately after they sighted the bull, she heaved herself up and stood a silhouette against the sky.
The wind was blowing from the beasts, so it was quite possible to get close up to them. The meat would be useful, so Berselius and his companion started, with Félix carrying the guns.
As they drew close Adams noticed that the back of the great cow seemed alive and in motion. Half a dozen rhinoceros birds, in fact, were upon it, and almost immediately, sighting the hunters, they rose chattering and fluttering in the air.
These birds are the guardians of the half-blind rhinoceros. They live on the parasites that infest his skin.It is a partnership. The birds warn the rhinoceros of danger, and he, vicariously, feeds the birds. Scarcely had the birds given warning than the bull heaved himself up. Berselius’s rifle rang out, but the light was uncertain, and the brute wounded, but not mortally, charged forward took a half circle, swung his head from side to side in search of his assailant, and sighted the cow. Instantly, horn down and squealing, he charged her. She met him horn to horn, and the smash could be heard at the camp where the porters and the soldiers stood gazing open-mouthed at the battle between the two great brutes charging each other in the low evening light, fighting with the ferocity of tigers and the agility of cats.
Adams, close up as he was, had a better view, and unless he had seen with his own eyes, he could not have believed that two animals so heavy and unwieldy could display such nimbleness and such quickness of ferocity.
It was the wickedest sight, and it was brought to an end at last by the rifle of Berselius.
Curiously enough, neither brute had injured the other very much. The horns which, had they been of ivory, must have been shivered, were intact, for the horn of a rhinoceros is flexible; it is built up of a conglomeration of hairs, and though, perhaps, the most unbreakable thing in the universe, it bends up to a certain point just as a rapier does.
Next morning, two hours after daybreak, Félix, who was scouting just ahead of the column, came running back with news he had struck elephant spoor. Everytooth in his head told the tale. Not only spoor, but the spoor of a vast herd cutting right across the line of march.
Berselius came forward to examine, and Adams came with him.
The dry ground and wire grass was not the best medium for taking the track of the beasts, but to the experienced eyes of Berselius and the Zappo Zap everything was clear. A herd of elephant had passed not long ago, and they were undisturbed and unsuspicious. When elephants are suspicious they march in lines, single file, one stepping in the tracks of another. This herd was spread wide and going easy of mind, but at what pace it would be impossible to say.
The long boat-shaped back feet of the bulls leave a print unmistakable in the rainy season when the ground is soft, but still discernible to the trained eye in the dry season. Félix declared that there were at least twenty bulls in the herd, and some of huge size.
“How long is it since they passed here?” asked Berselius.
Félix held up the fingers of one hand. From certain indications he came to the conclusion they had passed late in the night, three hours or so before daybreak. They numbered forty or fifty, leaving aside the calves that might be with them. He delivered these opinions, speaking in the native, and Berselius instantly gave the order, “Left wheel!” to the crowd of porters; and at the word the long column turned at right angles to the line of march and struck due west, treading the track of the herd.
Nothing is more exciting than this following in thetrack of a mammoth army whose tactics you cannot foresee. This herd might be simply moving a few miles in search of a new feeding ground, or it might be making one of those great sweeping marches covering hundreds of miles that the mysterious elephant people make at the dictates of their mysterious instinct. It might be moving at a gentle pace, or swifter than a man could run. A mile on the new route they came on a broken tree, a great tree broken down as if by a storm; the fractures were quite recent. The elephant folk had done this. They came across another tree whose sides, facing north and south, had been clearly barked, and the pieces of the bark, farther on, that had been chewed and flung away.
With one stroke of a tusk passing a tree, and without stopping, an elephant will tear off a strip of bark; and it was curious to see how the bark of this tree to east and west was intact. The moving herd had not stopped. Just in passing, an elephant on either side of the tree had taken his slice of bark, chewed it and flung it away. There were also small trees trodden down mercilessly under foot. Thus the great track of the herd lay before the hunters, but not a sign in all the sunlit, silent country before them of the herd itself.
It was Berselius’s aim to crowd up his men as quickly as a forced march could do it, camp and then pursue the herd with a few swift followers, the barest possible amount of stores and one tent.
The calabashes and the water bottles had been filled at the last halt, but it was desirable to find water for the evening’s camping place.
It was now that Berselius showed his capacity as a driver and his own enormous store of energy.
He took the tail of the column, and woe to the porters who lagged behind! Félix was with him, and Adams, who was heading the column, could hear the shouts of the Zappo Zap. The men with their loads went at a quick walk, sometimes breaking into a trot, urged forward by the gun-butt of Félix.
The heat was sweltering, but there was no rest. On, on, on, ever on through a country that changed not at all; the same breaks and ridges, the same limitless plains of waving grass, the same scant trees, the same heat-shaken horizon toward which the elephant road led straight, unwavering, endless.
The brain reeled with the heat and the dazzle, but the column halted not nor stayed. The energy of Berselius drove it forward as the energy of steam drives an engine. His voice, his very presence, put life into flagging legs and sight into dazzled eyes. He spared neither himself nor others; the game was ahead, the spoor was hot, and the panther in his soul drove him forward.
Toward noon they halted for two hours where some bushes spread their shade. The porters lay down on their bellies, with arms outspread, having taken a draught of water and a bite of food; they lay in absolute and profound slumber. Adams, nearly as exhausted, lay on his back. Even Félix showed signs of the journey, but Berselius sat right back into the bushes, with his knees drawn up and, with eyes fixed on the eastern distance, brooded.
He was always like this on a great hunt, when the game was near. Silent and brooding, and morose to the point of savagery.
One might almost have fancied that in far distant days this man had been a tiger, and that the tiger still lived slumbering in his soul, triumphant over death, driving him forth at intervals from civilization to wander in the wild places of the earth and slay.
Two hours past noon they resumed their journey: on, on, on, treading the elephant track which still went due east straight as an arrow to the blue horizon. The frightful tiredness they had felt before the noonday halt had passed, giving place to a dull, dreamy feeling, such as comes after taking opium. The column marched mechanically and without thought, knowing only two things, the feel of the hard ground and grass beneath their feet, and the smiting of the sun on their backs.
Thus the galley slaves of old laboured at their oars and the builders of the pyramids beneath their loads, all moving like one man. But here was no tune of flutes to set the pace, or monotonous song to help the lifting; only the voice of Berselius like a whip-lash, and the gun-butt of Félix drumming on the ribs of laggards.
A light, hot wind was blowing in their faces. Adams, still at the head of the column, had suffered severely during the morning march, and the re-start after the noon rest was painful to him as a beating; but the reserve forces of a powerful constitution that had never been tampered with were now coming into play, and, after a time, he felt little discomfort. His body, like a wound-up mechanism,did all the work; his mind became divorced from it; he experienced a curious exaltation, like that which comes from drink, only finer far and more ethereal. The column seemed marching far swifter than it was marching in reality, the vast sunlit land seemed vaster even than it was; the wind-blown grass, the far distant trees, the circling skyline, all spoke of freedom unknown to man: the freedom of the herd they were pursuing; the freedom of the bird flying overhead; the freedom of the wind blowing in the grass; the freedom of the limitless, endless, sunlit country. Meridians of silence, and light, and plains, and trees, and mountains, and forests. Parallels of virgin land.
He was feeling what the bird knows and feels when it beats up the mountains or glides down the vales of air; what the elephant herd knows and feels when it moves over mountains and across plains; what the antelopes know when distance calls them.
A shout from Félix, and the Zappo Zap came running up the line; his head was flung up and he was sniffing the air. Then, walking beside Adams, he stared ahead right away over the country before them to the far skyline.
“Elephant smell,” he replied, when Adams asked him what was the matter; then, turning, he shouted some words in the native back to Berselius, and tramped on beside Adams, his nose raised to the wind, of which each puff brought the scent stronger.
Adams could smell nothing, but the savage could tell that right ahead there were elephants; close up, too, yet not a sign of them could be seen.
This puzzled him, and what puzzles a savage frightens him.
His nose told him that here were elephants in sight of his eyes; his eyes told him that there were none.
All at once the column came to a dead halt. Porters flung down their loads and cried out in fright. Even Berselius stood stock-still in astonishment.
From the air, blown on the wind from no visible source, came the shrill trumpeting of an elephant.
There, in broad daylight, close up to them, the sound came with the shock of the supernatural. Nothing stirred in all the land but the grass bending to the wind. There was not even a bird in the air; yet close to them an elephant was trumpeting shrilly and fiercely as elephants trumpet when they charge.
Again came the sound, and once again, but this time it broke lamentably to a complaint that died away to silence.
Instantly the Zappo Zap came to himself. He knew that sound. An elephant was dying somewhere near by, caught in a trap possibly. He rushed down the line, gun-butting the porters back to their places, shouting to Berselius, helping loads up on the heads of the men who had dropped them, so that in a minute the column was in motion again and going swiftly to make up for lost time.
Five minutes brought them to a slight rise in the ground, beyond which, deep-cut, rock-strewn and skeleton-dry, lay the bed of a river.
In the rains this would be scarcely fordable, but now not even a trickle of water could be seen. On the floorof this river-bed, like a huge dark rock, lay the body of an elephant.
An African elephant is the biggest creature on earth, far bigger than his Indian cousin, and far more formidable looking. Adams could scarcely believe that the thing before him was the body of an animal, as he contrasted its size with Félix, who had raced down the slope and was examining the carcass.
“Dead!” cried Félix, and the porters, taking heart, descended, but not without groaning and lamentations, for it is well-known to the natives that whoever comes across an elephant lying down must die, speedily and by violent means; and this elephant was lying down in very truth, his tusks humbly lowered to the ground, his great ears motionless, just as death had left him.
It was a bull and surely, from his size, the father of the herd. Berselius considered the beast to be of great age. One tusk was decayed badly and the other was chipped and broken, and on the skin of the side were several of those circular sores one almost always finds on the body of a rhinoceros, “dundos,” as the natives call them; old scars and wounds told their tale of old battles and the wanderings of many years.
It might have been eighty or a hundred years since the creature had first seen the light and started on its wonderful journey over mountains and plains through jungle and forest, lying down maybe only twenty times in all those years, wandering hither and thither, and knowing not that every step of its journey was a step closer to here.
Just this little piece of ground on which it lay had been plotted out for it a hundred years ago, and it had come to it by a million mazy paths, but not less surely than had it followed the leading of a faultlessly directed arrow.
The herd had left it here to die. Berselius, examining the body closely, could find no wound. He concluded that it had come to its end just as old men come to their end at last—the mechanism had failed, hindered, perhaps, by some internal disease, and it had lain down to wait for death.
The tusks were not worth taking, and the party pursued its way up the eastern bank of the river, where the herd had also evidently pursued its way, and then on, on, across the country due east, in the track they had followed since morning.
As they left the river-bed a tiny dot in the sky above, which they had not noticed, enlarged, and like a stone from the blue fell a vulture. It lit on the carcass; then came a kite slanting down to the feast, and then from the blue, like stones dropped from the careless hand of a giant, vulture after vulture.
CHAPTER XIXTHE GREAT HERD
Félix kept his place beside Adams at the head of the column. The black seemed morose, and at the same time, excited.
Two things had disturbed him: the bad luck of meeting a lying-down elephant and the fact that a giraffe was with the herd. He had spotted giraffe spoor in the river-bed where the ground was sandy and showed up the impression well.
Now, the giraffe has the keen eyesight of a bird, and when he throws in his lot with the elephant folk who, though half-blind, have the keen scent of hounds, the combination is bad for the hunter.
An hour before sundown they struck some pools beside which grew a tree, the biggest they had yet come across, and here Berselius gave the order, halt and camp.
To half of the porters it was an order to fall down flat, their loads beside them, their arms outspread absolutely broken with the weariness of the march, broken, and speechless, and motionless, and plunged into such a depth of slumber that had you kicked them they would not have moved.
Berselius, himself, was nearly exhausted. He sat withhis back against the tree and gave his orders in a languid voice, and it was very curious to see the tents going up, wielded by men who seemed working in their sleep, slowly and with fumbling fingers, tripping over each other, pausing, hesitating, yet working all the same, and all in the still level light of evening that lent unreality to the scene.
Luck was against Berselius. It was quite within the bounds of probability that the herd might have halted here by the water for the night; but they had not. They had drunk here, for the pool was all trodden up and still muddy, and then gone on.
They were evidently making one of their great marches, and it was probable now that they would never be caught up with. Under these circumstances, Berselius determined to halt for the night.
Some small trees and bushes were cut to make a camp fire, and when they had finished supper Berselius, still with his back to the tree, sat talking to Adams by the light of the crackling branches.
He did not seem in the least put out with his failure.
“The rains will be on us in a week or two,” said he. “Then you will see elephants all over this place. They lie up in the inaccessible places in the dry season, but when the wet weather comes the herds spread over the plains. Not such herds as the one we have been following—it is rarely one comes across one like that. However, to-morrow we may have better luck with them. Félix tells me that forty miles beyond there, where they have gone, there are a lot of trees. They may stop andfeed, and if they do, we will have them. To-morrow I shall start light. Leave the main camp here. You and I and Félix, and four of the best of those men, and the smallest tent, enough stores for three or four days. Yes, to-morrow——” The man dozed off, sleep-stricken, the pipe between his teeth.
“To-morrow!” Portentous word!
They retired to their tents. Two sentries were posted to keep the fire going and to keep watch. The porters lay about, looking just like men who had fallen in battle, and after awhile the sentries, having piled the fire with wood, sat down, and the moon rose, flooding the whole wide land with light.
She had scarcely lifted her own diameter above the horizon when the sentries, flat on their backs, with arms extended, were sleeping as soundly as the others. Brilliant almost as daylight, still and peaceful as death, the light of the great moon flooded the land, paling the stars and casting the shadows of the tents across the sleepers, and the wind, which was now blowing from the west, shook the twigs of the tree, like skeleton fingers, over the flicker of the red burning camp-fire.
Now, the great herd of elephants had been making, as Berselius imagined possible, for the forest that lay forty miles to the east.
They had reached it before sundown, and had begun to feed, stripping branches of their leaves, the enormous trunks reaching up like snakes and whirling the leaves Catherine-wheellike down enormous throats; the purring and grumbling of their cavernous bellies, therubbing of rough shoulders against the bark, the stamping of feet crushing the undergrowth, resounded in echoes amongst the trees. The big bull giraffe that had cast its lot in with the herd was busy, too, tearing and snapping down twigs and leaves, feeding like the others, who were all feeding like one, even to the eighteen-month-old calves busy at the teats of their enormous dams.
The sunlight, level and low, struck the wonderful picture. Half the herd were in the wood, and you could see the tree branches bending and shaking to the reaching trunks. Half the herd were grazing on the wood’s edge, the giraffe amidst them, its clouded body burning in the sunset against the green of the trees.
The wind was blowing steadily along the edge of the wood and against a band of hunters of the Congo State, blacks armed with rifles, who were worming their way along from tree bole to tree bole, till within shooting distance of the bull elephant nearest to them.
The creatures feeding knew nothing of their danger till three shots, that sounded like one, rang out, and the bull, struck in the neck, the shoulder, and between the ear and eye, fell, literally all of a heap, as though some giant’s scimitar had swept its legs away from under it.
At this moment the sun’s lower edge had just touched the horizon. The whole visible herd on the edge of the wood, at the sound of the shots and the crash of the falling bull, wheeled, trumpeted wildly, and with trunks swung up, ears spread wide, swept away toward the sunset, following the track by which they had come; whilst, bursting from the woods, leaf-strewn, with greenbranches tangled in their tusks, furious and mad with fright, came the remainder, following in the same track, sweeping after the others, and filling the air with the thunder of their stampede.
Shot after shot rang out, but not an elephant was touched, and in two great clouds, which coalesced, the broken herd with the sound of a storm passed away along the road they had come by, the night closing on them as the sun vanished from the sky.
Berselius had not reckoned on this. No man can reckon on what the wilderness will do. The oldest hunter is the man who knows most surely the dramatic surprises of the hunt, but the oldest hunter would never have taken this into his calculations.
Here, back along the road they had travelled all day, was coming, not a peacefully moving herd, but a storm of elephants. Elephants who had been disturbed in feeding, shot at, and shot after, filled with the dull fury that dwells in an elephant’s brain for days, and with the instinct for safety that would carry them perhaps a hundred miles before dawn.
And right in the track of this terrible army of destruction lay the sleeping camp, the camp fire smouldering and fluttering its flames on the wind.
And the wind had shifted!
With the dark, as though the scene had been skilfully prepared by some infernal dramatist, just as the cover of night shut down tight and sealed, and suddenly, like a box-lid that had been upheld by the last rays of the setting sun, just as the great stars burst out above as if atthe touch of an electric button, the wind shifted right round and blew due east.
This change of wind would dull the sound of the oncoming host to the people at the camp; at the same time it would bring the scent of the human beings to the elephants.
The effect of this might be to make them swerve away from the line they were taking, but it would be impossible to tell for certain. The only sure thing was, that if they continued in their course till within eyeshot of the camp fire, they would charge it and destroy everything round about it in their fury.
A camp fire to an angry elephant is the equivalent of a red rag to a bull.
Thus the dramatic element of uncertainty was introduced into the tragedy unfolding on the plains, and the great stars seemed to leap like expectant hearts of fire till the moon broke over the horizon, casting the flying shadows of the great beasts before them.
The first furious stampede had settled into a rapid trot, to a sound like the sound of a hundred muffled drums beating a rataplan.
Instinct told the herd that immediate danger was past, also that for safety they would have to cover an immense space of country; so they settled to the pace most suitable for the journey. And what a pace it was, and what a sight!
Drifting across the country before the great white moon, fantastic beasts and more fantastic shadows, in three divisions line ahead, with the lanes of moonlight ruled between each line; calves by the cows,bulls in the van, they went, keeping to the scent of the track they had come by as unswervingly as a train keeps to the metals.
The giraffe was still with them. He and his shadow, gliding with compass-like strides a hundred yards away from the southward column; and just as the scent of the camp came to his mammoth friends, the sight of the camp fire, like a red spark, struck his keen eyes.
With a rasping note of warning he swerved to the south.
Now was the critical moment. Everything lay with the decision of the bulls leading the van, who, with trunks flung up and crooked forward, were holding the scent as a man holds a line. They had only a moment of time, but he who knows the elephant folk knows well the rapidity with which their minds can reason, and from their action it would seem that the arbiters of Berselius’s fate reasoned thus: “The enemy were behind; they are now in front. So be it. Let us charge.”
And they charged, with a blast of trumpeting that shook the sky; with trunks flung up and forward-driving tusks, ears spread like great sails, and a sound like the thunder of artillery, they charged the scent, the body of the herd following the leaders, as the body of a battering-ram follows the head.
Adams, when he had flung himself down in his tent, fell asleep instantly. This sleep, which was profound and dreamless, lasted but half an hour, and was succeeded by a slumber in which, as in a darkened room where a magic-lantern is being operated, vivid and fantastic picturesarose before him. He was on the march with the column through a country infinite as is space; the road they were taking, like the road to the tombs of the Chinese kings, was lined on either side with animals done in stone. At first these were tigers, and then, as though some veil of illusion had been withdrawn, he discovered them to be creatures far larger and more cruel, remorseless, and fearful than tigers; they were elephants—great stone elephants that had been standing there under the sun from everlasting, and they dwindled in perspective from giants to pigmies and from pigmies to grains of sand, for they were the guardians of a road whose end was infinity.
Then these vanished, but the elephant country under the burning sun remained. There was nothing to be seen but the sun-washed spaces of wind-blown grass, and broken ground, and scattered trees, till across the sky in long procession, one following the other, passed shadow elephants. Shadows each thrice the height of the highest mountain, and these things called forth in the mind of the sleeper such a horror and depth of dread that he started awake with the sweat running down his face.
Sleep was shattered, and in the excitement and nerve-tension of over-tiredness he lay tossing on his back. The long march of the day before, in which men had matched themselves against moving mountains, the obsession of the things they had been pursuing, had combined to shatter sleep.
He came out in the open for a breath of air.
The camp was plunged in slumber. The two sentriesordered by Berselius to keep watch and to feed the fire lay like the others, with arms outspread; the fire was burning low, as though drowned out by the flood of moonlight, and Adams was on the point of going to the pile of fuel for some sticks to feed it, when he saw a sight which was one of the strangest, perhaps, that he would ever see.
The sentry lying on the right of the fire sat up, rose to his feet, went to the wood pile, took an armful of fuel and flung it on the embers.
The fire roared up and crackled, and the sleep-walker, who had performed this act with wide-staring eyes that saw nothing, returned to his place and lay down.
It was as if the order of Berselius still rang in his ears and the vision of Berselius still dominated his mind.
Adams, thinking of this strange thing, stood with the wind fanning his face, looking over the country to the west, the country they had traversed that day in tribulation under the burning sun. There was nothing to tell now of the weary march, the pursuit of phantoms, the long, long miles of labour; all was peaceful and coldly beautiful, moonlit and silent.
He was about to return to his tent when a faint sound struck his ear. A faint, booming sound, just like that which troubles us when the eardrum vibrates on its own account from exhaustion or the effect of drugs.
He stopped his ears and the sound ceased.
Then he knew that the sound was a real sound borne on the air.
He thought it was coming to him on the wind, which was now blowing steadily in his face, and he strainedhis eyes to see the cause; but he saw nothing. There was no cloud in the sky or storm on the horizon, yet the sound was increasing. Boom, boom, becoming deeper and more sonorous, now like the long roll of muffled drums, now like the sea bursting in the sea-caves of a distant coast, or the drums of the cyclone when they beat the charge for the rushing winds. But the heart-searching feature of this strange booming in the night was a rhythm, a pulsation that spoke of life. This was no dull shifting of matter, as in an earthquake, or of air as in a storm; this sound was alive.
Adams sprang to the tent where Berselius was sleeping, and dragged him out by the arm, crying, “Listen!”
He would have cried, “See!” but the words withered on his lips at the sight which was now before him as he faced east.
An acre of rollicking and tossing blackness storming straight for the camp across the plain under the thunder that was filling the night. A thing inconceivable and paralyzing, till the iron grip of Berselius seized his arm, driving him against the tree, and the voice of Berselius cried, “Elephants.”
In a moment Adams was in the lower branches of the great tree, and scarcely had he gained his position than the sky split with the trumpeting of the charge and, as a man dying sees his whole life with one glance, he saw the whole camp of awakened sleepers fly like wind-blown leaves from before the oncoming storm, leaving only two figures remaining, the figures of Berselius and Félix.
The Zappo Zap had gone apart from the camp tosleep. He had drugged himself by smoking hemp, and he was lying half a hundred yards away, face down on the ground, dead to everything in earth and heaven.
Berselius had spied him.
What Adams saw then was, perhaps, the most heroic act ever recorded of man. The soul-shattering terror of the advancing storm, the thunder and the trumpeting that never ceased, had no effect on the iron heart of Berselius.
He made the instantaneous calculation that it was just possible to kick the man awake (for sound has no effect on the hemp-drugged one) and get him to the tree and a chance of safety. And he made the attempt.
And he would have succeeded but that he fell.
The root of a dead tree, whose trunk had long vanished, caught his foot when he had made half the distance, and brought him down flat on his face.
It was as though God had said, “Not so.”
Adams, in an agony, sweat pouring from him, watched Berselius rise to his feet. He rose slowly as if with deliberation, and then he stood fronting the oncoming storm. Whether he was dazed, or whether he knew that he had miscalculated his chances, who knows? But there he stood, as if disdaining to fly, face fronting the enemy. And it seemed to the watcher that the figure of that man was the figure of a god, till the storm closed on him, and seized and swung aloft by a trunk, he was flung away like a stone from a catapult somewhere into the night.
Just as a man clings to a mast in a hurricane, deaf, blind, all his life and energy in his arms, Adams clung to the tree bole above the branch upon which he was.
The storm below, the smashing of great bodies against the tree, the trumpeting whose prolonged scream never ceased—all were nothing. His mind was cast out—he had flung it away just as the elephant had flung Berselius away. To him the universe was the tree to which he was clinging, just that part which his arms encircled.
The herd had attacked in three columns, keeping the very same formation as they had kept from the start. The northern column, consisting of cows with their calves, drove on as if to safety, the others, cows and bulls—the cows even more ferocious than the bulls—attacked the camps, the tents, and the fire. They stamped and trod the fire out, smashing tent poles and chop boxes, stores and cooking utensils, tusking one another in the tight-packedmêlée, and the scream of the trumpeting never ceased.
Then they drove on.
The porters, all except two, had, unhappily for themselves, fled in a body to the west, and now mixed with the trumpeting and thunder could be heard the screams of men trodden under foot or tusked to pieces. These sounds ceased, and the trumpeting died away, and nothing could be distinguished but the dull boom, boom of the herd sweeping away west, growing fainter and fainter, and dying away in the night.
CHAPTER XXTHE BROKEN CAMP
The whole thing had scarcely lasted twenty minutes. During the storming and trumpeting, Adams, clinging to the tree, had felt neither terror nor interest. His mind was cast out, all but a vestige of it; this remnant of mind recognized that it was lying in the open palm of Death, and it was not afraid. Not only that, but it felt lazily triumphant. It is only the reasoning mind that fears death, the mind that can still say to itself, “What will come after?” The intuitive mind, which does not reason, has no fear.
Had not the herd been so closely packed and so furious, Adams would have been smelt out, plucked from the tree and stamped to pieces without any manner of doubt. But the elephants, jammed together, tusking each other, and rooting the camp to pieces, had passed on, not knowing that they had left a living man behind them.
As the sound of the storm died away, he came to his senses as a man comes to his senses after the inhalation of ether, and the first thing that was borne in upon him was the fact that he was clinging to a tree, and that he could not let go. His arms encircled the rough bark like bands of iron; they had divorced themselves from hiswill power, they held him there despite himself, not from muscular rigidity or spasm, but just because they refused to let go. They were doing the business of clinging to safety on their own account, and he had tothink himself free. There was no use in ordering them to release him, he had to reason with them. Then, little by little, they (fingers first) returned to discipline, and he slipped down and came to earth, literally, for his knees gave under him and he fell.
He was a very brave man and a very strong man, but now, just released from Death, now that all danger was over, he was very much afraid. He had seen and heard Life: Life whipped to fury, screaming and in maelstrom action, Life in its loudest and most appalling phase, and he felt as a man might feel to whom the gods had shown a near view of that tempest of fire we call the sun.
He sat up and looked around him on the pitiable ruins of the camp on which a tornado could not have wrought more destruction. Something lay glittering in the moonlight close to him. He picked it up. It was his shaving-glass, the most fragile thing in all their belongings, yet unbroken. Tent-poles had been smashed to matchwood, cooking utensils trodden flat, guns broken to pieces; yet this thing, useless and fragile, had been carefully preserved, watched over by some god of its own.
He was dropping it from his fingers when a cry from behind him made him turn his head.
A dark figure was approaching in the moonlight.
It was the Zappo Zap. The man whom Berselius,with splendid heroism, had tried to save. Like the looking-glass, and protected, perhaps, by some god of his own, the columns of destruction had passed him by. The column of cows with their calves had passed him on the other side. Old hunters say that elephants will not trouble with a dead man, and Félix, though awakened by the shaking of the earth, had lain like a dead man as the storm swept by.
He was very much alive, now, and seemingly unconcerned as he came toward Adams, stood beside him, and looked around.
“All gone dam,” said Félix. And volumes would not have expressed the situation more graphically. Then the savage, having contemplated the scene for a moment, rushed forward to a heap of stuff—broken boxes and what not—dragged something from it and gave a shout.
It was the big elephant rifle, with its cartridge-bag attached. The stock was split, but the thing was practically intact. Félix waved it over his head and laughed and whooped.
“Gun!” yelled Félix.
Adams beckoned to him, and he came like a black devil in the moonlight—a black devil with filed teeth and flashing eyeballs—and Adams pointed to the tree and motioned him to leave the gun there and follow him. Félix obeyed, and Adams started in the direction in which he had seen Berselius flung.
It was not far to walk, and they had not far to search. A hundred yards took them to a break in the ground, and there in the moonlight, with arms extended, lay thebody of the once powerful Berselius, the man who had driven them like sheep, the man whose will was law. The man of wealth and genius, great as Lucifer in evil, yet in courage and heroism tremendous. God-man or devil-man, or a combination of both, but great, incontestably great and compelling.
Adams knelt down beside the body, and the Zappo Zap stood by with incurious eyes looking on.
Berselius was not dead. He was breathing; breathing deeply and stertorously, as men breathe in apoplexy or after sunstroke or ruinous injury to the brain. Adams tore open the collar of the hunting shirt; then he examined the limbs.
Berselius, flung like a stone from a catapult, had, unfortunately for himself, not broken a limb. That might have saved him. His head was the injured part, and Adams, running his fingers through the hair, matted with blood, came on the mischief. The right parietal bone was dented very slightly for a space nearly as broad as a penny. The skin was broken, but the bone itself, though depressed slightly, was not destroyed. The inner table of the skull no doubt was splintered, hence the brain mischief.
There was only one thing to be done—trephine. And that as swiftly as possible.
Everything needful was in the instrument-case, but had it escaped destruction?
He raised Berselius by the shoulders. Félix took the feet, and between them they carried the body to the tree, where they laid it down.
Before starting to hunt for the instruments, Adams bled Berselius with his penknife. The effect was almost instantaneous. The breathing became less stertorous and laboured. Then he started to search hither and thither for the precious mahogany case which held the amputating knives, the tourniquets and the trephine. The Zappo Zap was no use, as he did not know anything about the stores, and had never even seen the instrument case, so Adams had to conduct the search alone, in a hurry, and over half an acre of ground. The case had almost to a certainty been smashed to pieces; still, there was a chance that the trephine had escaped injury. He remembered the shaving-glass, and how it had been miraculously preserved, and started to work. He came across a flat oblong disc of tin; it had been a box of sardines, it was now flattened out as though by a rolling mill. He came across a bottle of brandy sticking jauntily up from a hole in the ground, as if saying, “Have a drink.” It was intact. He knocked the head off and, accepting the dumb invitation, put it back where he had found it, and went on.
He came across long strips of the green rot-proof stuff the tents had been made of. They looked as though they had been torn up like this for rib-roller bandages, for they were just of that width. He came across half a mosquito-net; the other half was sailing away north, streaming from the tusk of a bull in which it was tangled, and giving him, no doubt, a sufficiently bizarre appearance under the quiet light of the moon and stars.
There were several chop boxes of stores intact; anda cigar box without a crack in it, and also without a cigar. It looked as though it had been carefully opened, emptied, and laid down. There was no end to the surprises of this search: things brayed to pieces as if with a pestle and mortar, things easily smashable untouched.
He had been searching for two hours when he found the trephine. It lay near the brass lock of the amputating case, attached to which there were some pieces of mahogany from the case itself.
A trephine is just like a corkscrew, only in place of the screw you have a cup of steel. This steel cup has a serrated edge: it is, in fact, a small circular saw. Applying the saw edge to the bone, and working the handle with half turns of the wrist, you can remove a disc from the outer table of the skull just as a cook stamps cakes out of a sheet of dough with a “cutter.”
Adams looked at the thing in his hands; the cup of chilled steel, thin as paper and brittle as glass, had been smashed to pieces, presumably; at all events, it was not there.
He flung the handle and the shaft away and came back to the tree beneath which the body of Berselius was lying. Berselius, still senseless, was breathing deeply and slowly, and Adams, having cut away the hair of the scalp round the wound with his penknife, went to the pool for water to bathe the wound; but the pool was trodden up into slush, and hours must elapse before the mud would settle. He remembered the bottle of brandy, fetched it, washed the wound with brandy, and with his handkerchief torn into three pieces bound it up.
There was nothing more to be done; and he sat down with his back to the tree to wait for dawn.
The bitterness of the thing was in his heart, the bitterness of being there with hands willing and able to help, yet helpless. A surgeon is as useless without his instruments as the cold, lifeless instruments are without a hand to guide them. It is not his fault that his hands are tied, but if he is a man of any feeling, that does not lessen the anguish of the situation.
Adams, listening to the breathing of the man he could not save, sat watching the moonlit desert where the grass waved in the wind. Félix, lying on his belly, had resumed his slumbers, and beside the sleeping savage lay the thing he worshipped more than his god, the big elephant rifle, across the stock of which his naked arm was flung.