CHAPTER XVII 



THE TERM : SPORT OF PRINCES 



A WIDE plain, stretching southward and eastward and 

 westward to the distant horizon, lately one sea of tall 

 grass, now blackened and swept bare by the annual 

 jungle fires, except where there remained patches and 

 islands of sedge and reed which had escaped the devas- 

 tating flames. These are often literally islands, l5ang be- 

 tween the serpentine and ever-branching courses of 

 sluggish streams, which take their rise in the swamps of 

 the Terai. The shikari elephants, which have plodded 

 their twelve-mile march with stealthy, long, striding step 

 all day through the dense forest of the Bhabar in the intense 

 heat of an April day, emerge into the open plain. Swamps 

 and muddy pools are reached, and the elephants, with 

 pleasant clapping of their great limber trunks and metallic 

 noises, talk to one another; and splash in the stagnant 

 water, squirting it over their hot and shiny sides, which 

 look black and gray and wrinkled, like an old man's 

 hand. Far away to the south, where the patches of long 

 grass follow the course of a slow-winding stream, cut Uke 

 a canal, but with ever-crumbling banks, through alluvial 

 mud, there appears some rising ground with bushes of 

 khair and sissoo-trees and dhak, all gorgeous with fire- 

 coloured blossom, and a few lofty semal-trees, and belts 

 of bright-green jamun, like willow, growing in the hollow 



