Adams, after a while, made no reply. The assurance and delight of Berselius as these fancied memories came to him shocked the heart. There was a horrible and sardonic humour in the whole business, a bathos that insulted the soul.
The dead leading the living, the blind leading the man with sight, lunacy leading sanity to death.
Yet there was nothing to be done but follow. As well take Berselius’s road as any other. Sunset would tell them whether they were facing the sunset; but he wished that Berselius would cease.
The situation was bad enough to bear without those triumphant calls.
It was past noon now; the light wind that had been blowing in their faces had died away; there was the faintest stirring of the air, and on this, suddenly, to Adams’s nostrils came stealing a smell of corruption, such as he had never experienced before.
It grew stronger as they went.
There was a slight rise in the ground before them just here, and as they took it the stench became almost insupportable, and Adams was turning aside to spit when a cry from Berselius, who was a few yards in advance, brought him forward to his side.
The rise in the ground had hidden from them a dried-up river-bed, and there before them in the sandy trough, huge amidst the boulders, lay the body of an elephant.
A crowd of birds busy about the carcass rose clamouring in the air and flew away.
“Do you remember?” cried Berselius.