THE BROKEN CAMP
The whole thing had scarcely lasted twenty minutes. During the storming and trumpeting, Adams, clinging to the tree, had felt neither terror nor interest. His mind was cast out, all but a vestige of it; this remnant of mind recognized that it was lying in the open palm of Death, and it was not afraid. Not only that, but it felt lazily triumphant. It is only the reasoning mind that fears death, the mind that can still say to itself, “What will come after?” The intuitive mind, which does not reason, has no fear.
Had not the herd been so closely packed and so furious, Adams would have been smelt out, plucked from the tree and stamped to pieces without any manner of doubt. But the elephants, jammed together, tusking each other, and rooting the camp to pieces, had passed on, not knowing that they had left a living man behind them.
As the sound of the storm died away, he came to his senses as a man comes to his senses after the inhalation of ether, and the first thing that was borne in upon him was the fact that he was clinging to a tree, and that he could not let go. His arms encircled the rough bark like bands of iron; they had divorced themselves from his will power, they held him there despite himself, not from muscular rigidity or spasm, but just because they refused to let go. They were doing the business of clinging to safety on their own account, and he had to think himself free. There was no use in ordering them to release him, he had to reason with them. Then, little by little, they (fingers first) returned to discipline, and he slipped down and came to earth, literally, for his knees gave under him and he fell.
He was a very brave man and a very strong man, but now, just released from Death, now that all danger was over, he was very much afraid. He had seen and heard Life: Life whipped to fury, screaming and in maelstrom action, Life in its loudest and most appalling phase, and he felt as a man might feel to whom the gods had shown a near view of that tempest of fire we call the sun.
He sat up and looked around him on the pitiable ruins of the camp on which a tornado could not have wrought more destruction. Something lay glittering in the moonlight close to him. He picked it up. It was his shaving-glass, the most fragile thing in all their belongings, yet unbroken. Tent-poles had been smashed to matchwood, cooking utensils trodden flat, guns broken to pieces; yet this thing, useless and fragile, had been carefully preserved, watched over by some god of its own.
He was dropping it from his fingers when a cry from behind him made him turn his head.
A dark figure was approaching in the moonlight.
It was the Zappo Zap. The man whom Berselius, with splendid heroism, had tried to save. Like the looking-glass, and protected, perhaps, by some god of his own, the columns of destruction had passed him by. The column of cows with their calves had passed him on the other side. Old hunters say that elephants will not trouble with a dead man, and Félix, though awakened by the shaking of the earth, had lain like a dead man as the storm swept by.
He was very much alive, now, and seemingly unconcerned as he came toward Adams, stood beside him, and looked around.