He held his breath, staring and gaping, and then backed nervously against the pedestal of the great Egyptian monument.
Had the shock of that awful bombardment broken his nerve? Was he mad? Bewitched by some ancient magic? Or was it, perhaps, that in one swift inappreciable moment he had been instantly killed by a fragment of shrapnel, and that, now, his emerging spirit could, even as it watched these familiar surroundings, peer back deep into the hidden mysteries of time?
He pressed himself, shivering and fascinated, against the hard, insistent reality of cold granite; but still in single file these three colossal shapes advanced, solemn and majestic, rocking magnificently with a slow and powerful gravity.
They were almost abreast of him now, sombre and stolid—three vast, prehistoric, unattended Elephants, imperturbably exploring the silences of this dead and lonely city.
They passed, and left him weak and trembling, but indescribably happy.
Two minutes later, a blind and insensible policeman, following the very path of those magical evocations of the thought of ancient Egypt, rode carelessly by, bearing the banal message that all was clear.
But the adventurer walked home in a dream of ecstasy. Whatever the future might hold for him, he had pierced the veil of the commonplace. He had seen and heard on the Thames Embankment that sacred, mystical procession of the Elephants.
He looked at Mrs. Gibson with something of contempt when she brought him his breakfast next morning. He could not respond to her chatter concerning the foolish detail of last night’s raid. She, poor woman, was afraid that she might, in some unknown way, have offended him. Her last effort was meant as an amiable diversion. One never knew whether people weren’t more scared than they chose to admit.
“There’s one amusin’ bit,” she said, laying his morning paper on the table, “as I just glanced at while I was waitin’ for the water to boil. It’s in Hincidents of the Raid. It seems as three performin’ elephunts goin’ ’ome from the ’Ippodrome or somewhere got loose—their keeper done a bolt, I suppose, when the guns began—and got walkin’ off by theirselves all down the Embankment. They must ’a been a comic sight, poor things. Terrified they was, no doubt....”