e 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 Felix.

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 g