IN HIS MADNESS HE MUST HAVE GONE BACK TO THE JUNGLE
For a fortnight no one heard anything of him. I expected him to return to me, but he never came back. Even to this day no one knows what happened to him. Evidently those miserable engineers had driven him out of his mind. In his madness he must have gone back to the jungle and by the time he recovered his senses was so lost in its depths that he could not come back. When his mind returns to him, an elephant can never remember the road that he took in his insanity, and if he runs very far into the jungle he may never come back because the Spirit of the jungle seizes him. Kari's last impression of human beings must have been so terrible that when the Spirit of the jungle asserted itself in him, he allowed it to lure him away forever from the habitations of men.
That is how it came about that I lost my friend and brother, the elephant. Though as an animal Kari is lost to me, my soul belongs to his soul and we shall never forget each other.