own 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 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 carcass.

"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,
perhap