d. The case had almost to a certainty been smashed to pieces;
still, there was a chance that the trephine had escaped injury. He
remembered the shaving-glass, and how it had been miraculously preserved,
and started to work. He came across a flat oblong disc of tin; it had been
a box of sardines, it was now flattened out as though by a rolling mill.
He came across a bottle of brandy sticking jauntily up from a hole in the
ground, as if saying, "Have a drink." It was intact. He knocked the head
off and, accepting the dumb invitation, put it back where he had found it,
and went on.

He came across long strips of the green rot-proof stuff the tents had been
made of. They looked as though they had been torn up like this for
rib-roller bandages, for they were just of that width. He came across half
a mosquito-net; the other half was sailing away north, streaming from the
tusk of a bull in which it was tangled, and giving him, no doubt, a
sufficiently bizarre appearance under the quiet light of the moon and
stars.

There were several chop boxes of stores intact; and a cigar box without a
crack in it, and also without a cigar. It looked as though it had been
carefully opened, emptied, and laid down. There was no end to the
surprises of this search: things brayed to pieces as if with a pestle and
mortar, things easily smashable untouched.

He had been searching for two hours when he found the trephine. It lay
near the brass lock of the amputating case, attached to which there were
some pieces of mahogany from the case itself.

A trephine is just like a corkscrew, only in place of the screw you have a
cup of steel. This steel cup has a serrated edge: it is, in fact, a small
circular saw. Applying the saw edge to the bone, and working the handle
with half turns of the wrist, you can remove a disc from the outer table
of the skull just as a cook stamps cakes out of a sheet of dough with a
"cutter."

Adams looked at the thing in his hands; the cup of chilled steel, thin as
paper and brittle as glass, had been smashed to pieces, presumably; at all
events, it was not there.

He flung the handle and the shaft away and came back to the tree beneath
which the body of Berselius was lying. Berselius, still senseless, was
breathing deeply and slowly, and Adams, having cut away the hair of the
scalp round the wound with his penknife, went to the pool for water to
bathe the wound; but the pool was trodden up into slush, and hours must