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 with his 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 and feed, 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, the rubbing 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 green branches 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 at the 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 pictures arose 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 sentries ordered 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 strained his 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 to sleep. 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-packed mÊlÉe, 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.