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 gra.s.s 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-b.u.t.ting 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 floor of 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 Felix, who had raced down the slope and was examining the carca.s.s.
"Dead!" cried Felix, 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 carca.s.s; 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 XIX
THE GREAT HERD
Felix 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 circ.u.mstances, 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. Felix 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 Felix, 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.ton, 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 m.u.f.fled drums beating a rataplan.