“Well, why do you call him Trousers?”
“Because elephants always look to me like a big body and two pairs of trousers. Now then, look out for canes and scratches.”
For the elephant they were on shuffled into the narrow track, whose sides and roof brushed the great cane howdah, and in a few moments they had passed from the glaring sunshine into the hot dank gloom of the forest, where the swishing noise of the abundant growth, forced aside and trampled down by the huge animals, was for a time the only sound.
“I say, he on the look-out, or out you’ll go. We’re getting into the wet now.”
Frank’s words were uttered just in time to make Ned seize hold of the side of the howdah, for the elephant they were on began to lurch and roll, as its legs sank deep in the soft mud and water which filled a series of holes in the track, and the driver turned round to them and smiled.
“Tell him to guide the elephant better,” said Ned, as this rocking motion went on. “He is letting it put its feet in all these holes.”
Frank laughed.
“It’s all right,” he said; “they always do that. The holes are the old footprints of other elephants, or their own, when they came along here before, and they get deeper and deeper, and full of mud and water. Elephants always keep to the old footprints, because they believe they are safe.”
“But he could make them go on the hard ground.”
Frank said something to the driver, who smiled as he replied.