chap. iv. ELEPHANT. 181 



Having satisfied my thirst, I turned to go out, though 

 not exactly on my former footsteps, and had almost 

 reached the edge when I came across the track of an 

 elephant evidently of quite a recent date, and turning 

 along it out of curiosity I found unmistakable evidences 

 of its having been there within the last few minutes. 

 This led me on, though I certainly did not intend to fol- 

 low the animal up into the reeds ; I should not have cared 

 to have done so by myself, for I knew by hearsay that 

 these elephants were proverbially rogues, and always 

 showed the strongest antipathy to human beings, but at 

 the same time I could not exactly bring myself not to go 

 a few yards upon a track so undoubtedly recent as this, 

 and there was a sort of feeling that if I did chance to find 

 it standing close by, and happened to kill it, what a great 

 thing it would be, for many a time old elephant-hunters 

 had told me that they would not dare to fire at one of 

 these, and there were camp-fire stories innumerable of how 

 men had followed them in, in spite of warning, and 

 nothing more had ever been heard of them, save, perhaps, 

 the report of their guns, or the wild savage trumpeting of 

 an infuriated elephant. Indeed, the dread in which the 

 spot and its denizens were held among the whole hunting 

 community was amply proved by the fact, that, although 

 it was a matter of perfect certainty that these reeds con- 

 cealed large quantities of ivory, elephants having lived and 

 died in them long before the memory of living man, or the 

 traditions of their forefathers, no one had ever dared 

 to search for it. 



So I followed the great footprint ; further and further 

 among the gloomy avenues and cave-like passages formed 



