nd bent it gently in its
passage.

A long time passed, and then the black sketch appeared again outlined on
the sky. It grew in size, and as it grew Adams fingered the triggers of
the gun, and his lips became as dry as sand, so that he had to lick them
and keep on licking them, till his tongue became dry as his lips and his
palate dry as his tongue.

Then he rose up, rifle in hand, for the Zappo Zap had come to speaking
distance. Adams advanced to meet him. There was a dry, dull glaze about
the creature's lips and chin that told a horrible story, and at the sight
of it the white man halted dead, pointed away to where the birds were
again congregating, cried "Gr-r-r," as a man cries to a dog that has
misbehaved, and flung the rifle to his shoulder.

Felix broke away and ran. Ran, striking eastward, and bounding as a buck
antelope bounds with a leopard at its heels, whilst the ear-shattering
report of the great rifle rang across the land and a puff of white dust
broke from the ground near the black bounding figure. Adams, cursing
himself for having missed, grounded the gun-butt and stood watching the
dot in the distance till it vanished from sight.

He had forgotten the fact that Felix was the guide and that without him
the return would be a hazardous one; but had he remembered this, it would
have made no difference. Better to die in the desert twenty times over
than to return escorted by _that_.

It was now getting toward sundown. The great elephant country in which the
camp lay lost had, during the daytime, three phases. Three spirits
presided over this place; the spirit of morning, of noon, and of evening.
In towns and cities, even in the open country of civilized lands, these
three are clad in language and bound in chains of convention, reduced to
slaves whose task is to call men to rise, to eat, or sleep. But here, in
this vast place, one saw them naked--naked and free as when they caught
the world's first day, like a new-minted coin struck from darkness, and
spun it behind them into night.

Under the presidency of these three spirits the land was ever changing;
the country of the morning was not the country of the noon, nor was the
country of the noon the country of the evening.

The morning was loud. I can express it in no other terms. Dawn came like a
blast of trumpets, driving the flocks of the red flamingoes before it,
tremendous, and shattering the night of stars at the first fanfare. A
moment later, an