THE 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 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.