At about twenty paces I fired and hit--not Jana but the lame priest who
was fulfilling the office of mahout, perched upon his shoulders many
feet above the point at which I had aimed. Yes! I hit him in the head,
which was shattered like an eggshell, so that he fell lifeless to the
ground.

In perfect desperation again I aimed, and fired when Jana was not more
than thirty feet away. This time the bullet must have gone wide to
the left, for I saw a chip fly from the end of the animal's broken and
deformed tusk, which stuck out in that direction several feet clear of
its side.

Then I gave up all hope. There was no time to gain my feet and escape;
indeed I did not wish to do so, who felt that there are some failures
which can only be absolved by death. I just knelt there, waiting for the
end.

In an instant the giant creature was almost over me. I remember looking
up at it and thinking in a queer sort of a way--perhaps it was some
ancestral memory--that I was a little ape-like child about to be slain
by a primordial elephant, thrice as big as any that now inhabit the
earth. Then something appeared to happen which I only repeat to show how
at such moments absurd and impossible things seem real to us.

The reader may remember the strange dream which Hans had related to me
that morning.

One incident of this phantasy was that he had met the spirit of the Zulu
lady Mameena, whom I knew in bygone years, and that she bade him tell me
she would be with me in the battle and that I was to look for her when
death drew near to me and "Jana thundered on," for then perchance I
should see her.

Well, no doubt in some lightning flash of thought the memory of these
words occurred to me at this juncture, with the ridiculous result that
my subjective intelligence, if that is the right term, actually created
the scene which they described. As clearly, or perhaps more clearly than
ever I saw anything else in my life, I appeared to behold the beautiful
Mameena in her fur cloak and her blue beads, standing between Jana and
myself with her arms folded upon her breast and looking exactly as she
did in the tremendous moment of her death before King Panda. I even
noted how the faint breeze stirred a loose end of her outspread hair
and how the sunlight caught a particular point of a copper bangle on her
upper arm.

So she stood, or rather seemed to stand, quite still; and as it
happened, at that moment the giant Jana, either because som