knees, its trunk outstretched and the points of its worn tusks resting
on the ground. Evidently it was dead.

I let my eyes travel on, and behold! about fifty yards beyond the dead
bull was a mound of hard rock. I watched it with gasping expectation
and--yes, on the top of the mound something slowly materialized.
Although I knew what it must be well enough, for a while I could not see
quite clearly because there were certain little clouds about and one of
them had floated over the face of the moon. It passed, and before me,
perhaps a hundred and forty paces away, outlined clearly against the
sky, I perceived the devilish elephant of my vision.

Oh! what a brute was that! In bulk and height it appeared to be half
as big again as any of its tribe which I had known in all my life's
experience. It was enormous, unearthly; a survivor perhaps of some
ancient species that lived before the Flood, or at least a very giant of
its kind. Its grey-black sides were scarred as though with fighting. One
of its huge tusks, much worn at the end, for evidently it was very old,
gleamed white in the moonlight. The other was broken off about halfway
down its length. When perfect it had been malformed, for it curved
downwards and not upwards, also rather out to the right.

There stood this mammoth, this leviathan, this _monstrum horrendum,
informe, ingens_, as I remember my old father used to call a certain
gigantic and misshapen bull that we had on the Station, flapping a pair
of ears that looked like the sides of a Kafir hut, and waving a trunk
as big as a weaver's beam--whatever a weaver's beam may be--an appalling
and a petrifying sight.

I squatted behind the skeleton of an elephant which happened to be handy
and well covered with moss and ferns and watched the beast, fascinated,
wishing that I had a large-bore rifle in my hand. What became of Marut I
do not exactly know, but I think that he lay down on the ground.

During the minute or so that followed I reflected a good deal, as we
do in times of emergency, often after a useless sort of a fashion. For
instance, I wondered why the brute appeared thus upon yonder mound, and
the thought suggested itself to me that it was summoned thither from
some neighbouring lair by the trumpet call of the dying elephant. It
occurred to me even that it was a kind of king of the elephants, to
which they felt bound to report themselves, as it were, in the hour
of their decease. Certainly what follow