"The black damsels ran off together as the unlucky reefer picked himself up, coming to us with his hair rubbed up like a brush, his cap out of shape in his hand, and the gold band off it, his red face shining, and all the gilt anchor-buttons off his jacket, besides being minus his dirk. 'Simm, Simm, my fine fellow!' said his friend the cadet, like to die with laughing, 'what—what did they do to you?—why, your head looks like a chimney-sweep's mop!' Simm knocked his cap against a tree to set it right, without a word, and we followed the others to the boat, where he swore, however, that he'd kissed 'em all three, at which Mrs Atkins fairly took him a slap on the side of the head, saying he was a nasty, improper boy, and she was glad his poor mother couldn't see him run after creatures of that kind in African woods. 'Natives, indeed!' said she, 'I have heard so often of native modesty, too, in books; but, after all, there's nothing like experience, I think, Sir Charles?' 'Certainly not, ma'am,' replied the judge, humouring her, as she hadn't often had the chance of speaking to him before; ''tis almost as bad in India, though, you know.' 'Oh, there, Sir Charles,' said the lady, 'I never happened to go out, of course, except in the carriage!' 'Ah,' said the judge, coolly, 'you should try an elephant, sometimes, ma'am.'
"After this, as Sir Charles was bent on getting a shot at something better, with a glass or two of Madeira to refresh us, we pulled farther still up the small river, passing the mouth of a deep marshy inlet, where I noticed a few long canoes belonging to the Congo village we had seen; the close, heavy heat of the woods getting, if possible, worse; and the rank green growth topping up round us as flat as before; when the sound of a loud rush of water up-stream broke upon us through the bush to northward, the surface rippling, and a slight cool breath seeming to flutter across it now and then, the very noise putting fresh soul into you. Suddenly we opened out on a broad bend, where it was hard work to force her round, and next moment a low fall was gleaming before us, where a hill-stream came washing and plashing over one wide rocky step above another in the turn, then sweeping out of a deep pool to both hands, and running away ahead, in between the spread of trees, seemingly to a sort of a lagoon, where you saw the light in the middle glancing bright down upon its face. A broad blue burst of air and light struck down along the hollow the stream rushed out of, off the roots of a regular mountain, leaning back to the sky, with its big tufted knolls and its shady rifts thrown out blue beyond one or two thick scaly-stemmed date-trees, waving their long, feathery, fringe-like leaves to the least bit of a breeze, on as many rough points near at hand; the whole shape of the mountain you couldn't see for the huge mahogany-trees, teak, and African oak, rising up over one shoulder into a lump of green forest. In five minutes more we were through into the lagoon, which very possibly took round into the main river again, only the opposite end, to our surprise, was all afloat with logs of big timber choking it up, so that there we must stick or go back upon our wake.
"However, the lagoon itself being broad enough and round enough in all conscience, with a deep hollow opening up out of it on the high ground, the judge and the cadets thought a better place couldn't have been chosen for landing after a little sport, while we left the fair ladies to rest in the cool, and look at the lotus-lilies spread all over one cove of it, floating white on their large leaves. The green edge of scum ran about the black shadow on the rest of it, gathering round where a big branch or two had fallen in, with the hot white sky looking bluer out through the broad leaves coming together aloft, and the showers of little sharp ones in the tamarind twigs, mangoes, ironwood, sumach, and all sorts, while here and there a knot of crimson blossoms looked out from under the boughs in the dark, humming with small flies. Beautiful spot as it was every way, especially after the heat, yet I didn't much like the idea of letting the ladies stay by themselves, except the sailor and the kitmagar. Nothing particular had turned up to trouble us, certainly, but I daresay 'twas because there was one of them I never looked at without her soft fairy-like air making me think of something that might happen to her, life-like though she seemed. When I saw a big branch over her head, I kept fancying what it would do if it fell—and now, the thumping slabs and stones we scrambled over up into the gully toward the mountain, seemed to have come tumbling down off it to the very water's edge, covered with nets of thick creeping plants and trails of flat, fingery-leaved flowers, such as you see in hot-houses at home. A few yards higher, too, where the ground broke away into a slanting hollow out of the bush, 'twas all trampled and crushed, half-withering together in the heat of the sun, the young trees twisted and broken, and two or three good-sized ones lying out from the roots, which I set to the score of the timbers rolling down their logs, for some craft that evidently got their cargoes hereaway.
"After all, the thought of a slap at some wild game was tempting enough, the judge appearing to consider anyone but a sportsman nobody at all; so up we went behind him out of the gully till we were all blowing like so many porpoises on the head of it, Sir Charles raising his finger as we peeped across a grassy slope right under us, where a whole drove of small slender-legged antelopes were feeding. We had just time to rest, getting a breath of air off the heights, when one of the foremost lifted its head, listening the opposite way from us; next moment the entire scatter of them came sweeping direct over to leeward in a string—we could almost catch their bright black eyes through the grass, when the crack of our seven barrels turned them bolt off at a corner, and they were gone like wind on water. All of us had missed save Sir Charles Hyde, but his rifle-bullet had sent one of the antelopes springing up in the air ten feet or so, rolling over and over into the grass again, where we found it lying with its tongue out, and its large eye glazing amidst the blades and dust—a pair of huge turkey buzzards falling, as it were, out of two specks in the sun above us, already, and rising with an ugly flap while we got round the dead creature.
"Hallo!' said the mid suddenly, looking back over toward the hollow we'd come out of, 'what's that?'
"From where we stood we could just see through the wild cane to the mouth of the gully, half-a-mile down or more, leading upon the trees by the lagoon. I thought I could hear a dull heavy sound now and then going thump thump down the hollow and along it, the stones rumbling from one spot to another at the root of the hill; but noticing a light smoke rising farther into the course of the creek, with a faint echo of axes at work somewhere in the woods below, I wasn't sorry to find the timberers were still in the river, showing we weren't the only civilised folks that thought it fit to visit. Perhaps it might have been a quarter of an hour or more, however, and we were all looking out sharp for birds of any kind to pop at, happening to turn my head, I saw the long reeds were moving about the banks below and the trees twisting about furiously, and no sooner had I made a few paces than good heavens!—right in the break of the trees at the landing-place—there was a huge brute of some sort coming slowly up out of the water; then another, and another, glistening wet in the bright light as the shadow of the branches slipped behind them. A blindness came over my eyes, and I had scarce time to make out the big block-like heads and moving trunks of five or six black African elephants, ere the whole case flashed upon me, and away I dashed full-speed down the slope. The big beasts were turning quietly off into the hollow, and two or three of their calves trotted after them out of the bushes, munching the young cane-stalks as they lifted their pillars of legs and their tufty little tails, when I passed a fire of sticks blazing under a slab of rock, with the judge's guinea-fowl plucked and roasting before it from a string, the bowman's tarpaulin and his pipe lying near by—a sight that doubled the horror in me, to know he had left the boat at all; and no doubt, as I thought, taken fright and run off, man-o'war's-man though he was. I made three springs over the stones down to the water, terrified to look in, hearing it, as I did, splash and wash about the sides, up among the leaves of the trees, while a couple of monstrous brutes were to be seen by the light in the midst of it, still wallowing about, and seeming to enjoy sending the whole pool in wide rings and waves as far as it would go, with the noise besides; the one-half swimming and the biggest standing aground as he poured the water out of his long trunk all over his back, then broke off a branch and waved it to and fro like a fan round his flapping leathery ears.
"Such a moment I hope never to know again—not the least sign of the boat could I see in the green black blink of the place, after the glare above, and I stood like a madman at the thought of what the herd of monsters had done when they came suddenly down upon it; then I gave a wild cry, and levelled my ship's musket at the big elephant's head as he brought his small cunning eye slowly to bear upon me, dropped the branch, and began to swing his forehead, all the time looking at me, and wading out to the shallow—by Jove! my flesh creeps at it just now—though I couldn't have stirred for worlds till he was close enough for me to fire into that devilish eye of his. 'Twas no more than the matter of half-a-minute—till you may fancy what I felt to catch sight, all at once, of the cutter splashing up and down in the gloom below the branches, the ladies and the Hindoo crouching down terrified together, except Violet Hyde, who stood straight, holding the boat firm in by a bough, her white face fixed through the shadow, and her hair floating out of her straw bonnet each time her head went up among the leaves, with her glittering eyes on the two elephants.
"Suddenly some heavy black figure dropped almost right over her into the boat, and she let go with a low cry, and sank down with her hands over her eyes; when they went sheering out towards the creek, the foretopman handling his boat-hook in her bow, without his tarpaulin. As for the wild elephants, I had just time to come to myself before the foremost had his feet on the stones below me, getting cautiously out of the pool; these awkward antics of theirs being possibly signs of too much satisfaction in a bathe for them to show aught like fury, if you didn't rouse them; so I was slipping quietly round the nearest tree when I heard the cadets halloing up the hill. The old bull elephant seemed a dangerous customer to meet, and I was hurrying over the dead grass and branches to give warning, just as Sir Charles Hyde could be seen coming down before the rest, his rifle over his shoulder.
"However, he brought up the moment I sang out to stop: both the elephants were stalking off lower down into the hollow, and I dropped behind the slab where Tom Wilkes had been roasting his bird, when some fool of a cadet let drive at the bull elephant from above, hitting him fair on the front. You heard the rifle-bullet hit slap against it as if on an anvil: the she elephant made off at a fast trot, but the big brute himself turned round on the moment, lifting up his trunk straight aloft with a sharp trumpeting scream through it, and looked round till his small red eye lighted on the judge, who seemed quite out of breath from his sport.
'The fire! that fire, for God's sake, Mr Westwood, else I am lost!' called out Sir Charles, in a calm distinct key from where he stood with his eye fixed on the elephant, and could see me, too—a moment or two before the huge round-backed lump of a brute came running round into the track, stumbling heavily up the dead branches of the fallen trees and the dry guinea-grass, with a savage roar between his two white tusks—and I saw what the judge meant just in time to throw over the whole heap of flaming cocoa-tree husk among the withered grass and stuff a few yards before the monster, as dry as tinder, while the light air coming down the gully of the mountain, drove it spreading across his course up through the twigs, and sweeping in one sudden gust of fire up to the very end of his trunk. I saw it lift over the smoke like a black serpent, then another scream from the brute, and away he was charging into the hollow again, the flame licking up among the grass astern of him, and darting from one bough to another towards the cane-brake below. I had scarce drawn a long breath and remembered the devil's own thought that had come into my head, when the judge called to me, ere he slapped me on the shoulder.