lake was a great open space where nothing seemed to grow and
all about this space were the skeletons of hundreds of dead elephants.
There they lay, some of them almost covered with grey mosses hanging to
their bones, through which their yellow tusks projected as though they
had been dead for centuries; others with the rotting hide still on them.
I knew that I was looking on a cemetery of elephants, the place where
these great beasts went to die, as I have since been told the extinct
moas did in New Zealand. All my life as a hunter had I heard rumours
of these cemeteries, but never before did I see such a spot even in a
dream.

See! There was one dying now, a huge gaunt bull that looked as though it
were several hundred years old. It stood there swaying to and fro. Then
it lifted its trunk, I suppose to trumpet, though of course I could
hear nothing, and slowly sank upon its knees and so remained in the last
relaxation of death.

Almost in the centre of this cemetery was a little mound of water-washed
rock that had endured when the rest of the stony plain was denuded in
past epochs. Suddenly upon that rock appeared the shape of the most
gigantic elephant that ever I beheld in all my long experience. It had
one enormous tusk, but the other was deformed and broken off short. Its
sides were scarred as though with fighting and its eyes shone red and
wickedly. Held in its trunk was the body of a woman whose hair hung down
upon one side and whose feet hung down upon the other. Clasped in her
arms was a child that seemed to be still living.

The rogue, as a brute of this sort is called, for evidently such it was,
dropped the corpse to the ground and stood a while, flapping its ears.
Then it felt for and picked up the child with its trunk, swung it to and
fro and finally tossed it high into the air, hurling it far away. After
this it walked to the elephant that I had just seen die, and charged
the carcass, knocking it over. Then having lifted its trunk as though to
trumpet in triumph, it shambled off towards the forest and vanished.

The curtain of mist fell again and in it, dimly, I thought I saw--well,
never mind who or what I saw. Then I awoke.

"Well, did you see anything?" asked a chorus of voices.

I told them what I had seen, leaving out the last part.

"I say, old fellow," said Scroope, "you must have been pretty clever to
get all that in, for your eyes weren't shut for more than ten seconds."

"Then I wonder wha