Feeling battered and bruised, he got up, shaking off the mass of earth, leaves, and twigs that had fallen with him, and began to grope about in the darkness. In a moment or two he stumbled over something hard, which rattled as he kicked it. He stooped down, and felt with his hand, which touched a heap of bones.
A shudder ran through him, and he recoiled. "Don't be a silly ass," he said to himself, and stooped again, taking up one bone after another. He could not help heaving a sigh of relief. Such large bones could never have been the framework of a human body. "I'm jiggered," he thought. "Of course, I've tumbled into an elephant pit. And how in the world am I to get out?"
He knew that elephants were sometimes trapped in deep pits by the natives, and he had vague recollections of stories of men who had fallen into such pits and never got out again.
Looking upward, he saw signs of dawn through the narrow opening. But within the pit it was still too dark for him to see the nature of the place into which he had fallen. He could only examine it by the sense of touch.
The result of his examination was alarming. He walked round the pit, testing the walls with his hand in the hope of finding a place where the earth had broken away, so that he could climb up. But he found that the walls sloped inward, like an inverted cup. They were quite unscalable.
At this discovery he was aghast. What could he do? He was twelve or fifteen feet below the ground, and though he groped around for objects with which to make a sort of pedestal, he found nothing but the elephant's bones.
"It's no good getting into a stew," he thought. "I had better wait until it is light. Perhaps I'll see a way out then."
He sat down, reflecting that, if there were no other way, he would have to dig up earth with his pocket-knife, and make a pillar high enough, if he stood on it, to enable him to reach the sides of the hole. The thought that, even if he succeeded in this, the earth above might break away in his hands, made him shiver.
In course of time the sky changed from dark blue to grey, and from grey to light blue. But the bottom of the pit was only dimly illuminated, because the hole was so small. He saw now, however, that the bones formed a complete skeleton, and that a pair of enormous tusks lay imbedded in moss, leaves, and earth.
Clearly the pit had long been disused. Those who had dug it had either forgotten it, or more probably had been killed in Tubu raids. The elephant must have met its fate many years before, for nothing but the skeleton remained.