The Crystal Sceptre: A Story of Adventure

by Philip Verrill Mighels

I believe I was saved only by a sort of half shoulder of the hill and the fact that I fell and was flat on my side when the explosion occurred.

In my brain a panorama of all the tragedy ran, time after time. It seemed unbelievable that the Blacks had been able to drive the elephants. I shall never cease to wonder at this remarkable performance, for everything I know of the jungle’s greatest brute leads me always to suppose they would turn upon their pigmy tormentors and drive them away in confusion, no matter how great their numbers. But more incredible than even this was the sudden blotting out of all that mad stampede. I felt like the last man left on earth.

It was quite impossible for me to go down that dread slope as yet. I sat on the ground, dejected, weak from hunger and the strain of all the excitement. I rested my chin in my hand and gazed off abstractedly toward the endless sea of green. I lost all interest in the world about me, for all my memories and all my dreams had conveyed me afar from that island of singular fates. At length I was aroused from my reverie by Fatty, who came furtively down from the village and crawled in front of my feet, to gaze in my face, with his comical, quizzical expression of deep anxiety spread thickly on his homely phiz.

“Hullo,” said I, “did you come back at last to twist the enemy’s tail?”

Then I saw an amazing line of heads above the wall, where dozens of our fellows were peering down upon the scene and upon myself. On their faces I noted every conceivable look of awe and horror. That I sat there, seemingly calm after all of that day’s fatal work, impressed them a thousand fold more than as if I had strutted and boasted of the deed. Perhaps my face betrayed a certain look of grimness, which events had compelled in my thoughts; howbeit the creatures were stricken with an overpowering dread of my presence.

The hill-shaking explosion had been infinitely more terrific than my first little celebration with a single bomb, and this had given them all a fright, the memory of which could never be eradicated from their minds. But if this had rendered them respectful toward me as the actuating spirit of it all, the sight of the slope simply drowned them in fathomless awe. The mightiest creatures of the jungle, torn apart like things of paper, the hill split open and altered, a yelling army scattered and blown to atoms—this sum of deeds appalled them so thoroughly that the strongest might have died of shock had I jabbed him in the ribs with my thumb.

Fatty, on seeing that I lived, began to grovel on his face and to push his head against the soil where my feet had rested, as if he were quite unfit to abide on the surface of my earth and would therefore worm and bore his way down and out of sight without further ado.

One after another, then, the trembling fellows came crawling down the hill, many on their stomachs, to adore my tracks, to wriggle about my feet and otherwise to endeavour to calm me down and humble themselves in my exalted shadow. Even the chief came toward me on hands and knees, dragging his club and afraid to lift his head. His downfall was complete; there were none more thoroughly overwhelmed than he. On the ground before me the fellow laid his great crystal weapon—at once his sceptre and his sword—and he, too, adored the turf where my feet had trod. The women, with the albino among them, and even the children, got on the ground, prostrate, abject and afraid.

“Ahem, really, fellow citizens,” said I with a grin, “your attentions quite overcome me. Pray excuse my unseemly emotion and blushes.”

I had conducted a large experiment with some success, yet I felt that my efforts had been far from superhuman, and not even carried out with wholly unselfish motives. I felt in fact that the whole present proposition bordered on the lines of comic opera, for I knew that by the token of the chiefs submission I stood there at last, the King of the Missing Links!