The Pools of Silence

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

All at once the column came to a dead halt. Porters flung down their loads and cried out in fright. Even Berselius stood stock-still in astonishment.

From the air, blown on the wind from no visible source, came the shrill trumpeting of an elephant.

There, in broad daylight, close up to them, the sound came with the shock of the supernatural. Nothing stirred in all the land but the grass bending to the wind. There was not even a bird in the air; yet close to them an elephant was trumpeting shrilly and fiercely as elephants trumpet when they charge.

Again came the sound, and once again, but this time it broke lamentably to a complaint that died away to silence.

Instantly the Zappo Zap came to himself. He knew that sound. An elephant was dying somewhere near by, caught in a trap possibly. He rushed down the line, gun-butting the porters back to their places, shouting to Berselius, helping loads up on the heads of the men who had dropped them, so that in a minute the column was in motion again and going swiftly to make up for lost time.

Five minutes brought them to a slight rise in the ground, beyond which, deep-cut, rock-strewn and skeleton-dry, lay the bed of a river.

In the rains this would be scarcely fordable, but now not even a trickle of water could be seen. On the floor of this river-bed, like a huge dark rock, lay the body of an elephant.

An African elephant is the biggest creature on earth, far bigger than his Indian cousin, and far more formidable looking. Adams could scarcely believe that the thing before him was the body of an animal, as he contrasted its size with Félix, who had raced down the slope and was examining the carcass.

“Dead!” cried Félix, and the porters, taking heart, descended, but not without groaning and lamentations, for it is well-known to the natives that whoever comes across an elephant lying down must die, speedily and by violent means; and this elephant was lying down in very truth, his tusks humbly lowered to the ground, his great ears motionless, just as death had left him.

It was a bull and surely, from his size, the father of the herd. Berselius considered the beast to be of great age. One tusk was decayed badly and the other was chipped and broken, and on the skin of the side were several of those circular sores one almost always finds on the body of a rhinoceros, “dundos,” as the natives call them; old scars and wounds told their tale of old battles and the wanderings of many years.