Adams sprang to the tent where Berselius was sleeping, and dragged him out by the arm, crying, “Listen!”
He would have cried, “See!” but the words withered on his lips at the sight which was now before him as he faced east.
An acre of rollicking and tossing blackness storming straight for the camp across the plain under the thunder that was filling the night. A thing inconceivable and paralyzing, till the iron grip of Berselius seized his arm, driving him against the tree, and the voice of Berselius cried, “Elephants.”
In a moment Adams was in the lower branches of the great tree, and scarcely had he gained his position than the sky split with the trumpeting of the charge and, as a man dying sees his whole life with one glance, he saw the whole camp of awakened sleepers fly like wind-blown leaves from before the oncoming storm, leaving only two figures remaining, the figures of Berselius and Félix.
The Zappo Zap had gone apart from the camp to sleep. He had drugged himself by smoking hemp, and he was lying half a hundred yards away, face down on the ground, dead to everything in earth and heaven.
Berselius had spied him.
What Adams saw then was, perhaps, the most heroic act ever recorded of man. The soul-shattering terror of the advancing storm, the thunder and the trumpeting that never ceased, had no effect on the iron heart of Berselius.
He made the instantaneous calculation that it was just possible to kick the man awake (for sound has no effect on the hemp-drugged one) and get him to the tree and a chance of safety. And he made the attempt.
And he would have succeeded but that he fell.
The root of a dead tree, whose trunk had long vanished, caught his foot when he had made half the distance, and brought him down flat on his face.