“The noise was terrific, and it suddenly dawned upon me that so far from moving off he was coming on. I was powerless to move--a fall would have been fatal--so I waited; but the forest was so dense that I never saw him till his head was literally above me, when I fired both barrels of the .500 magnum in his face. The whole forest seemed to crumple up, and a second later I found myself ten feet above the ground, well home in a thorn bush, while my gun was lying ten yards away in the opposite direction; and I heard a roar as of thunder disappearing into the distance. A few seconds later the most daring of my boys, Zowanji, came hurrying along with that sickly green hue that a nigger’s face assumes in moments of fear, and with his assistance I descended from my spiky perch. I was drenched with blood, which fortunately proved to be not mine, but that of the elephant; my gun, which I recovered, was also covered with blood, even to the inside of the barrels. The only damage I sustained was a slightly twisted knee. I can not say whether the elephant actually struck me, or whether I was carried there by the rush of the country.” Following up, Grogan found enormous pools of blood, and half a mile farther on heard grunts that showed that the elephant had scented him. The animal rushed about with terrifying shrieks, devastated half an acre of forest, and then moved on again. Several times the hunter caught up, but the elephant moved on at an increasing pace, until sunset put an end to Grogan’s hopes. This part of the Rift has belts of forest, and close beside them are patches of rich populous country where black nations live in fat contentment. But for five years there had been trouble to the westward where the Congo army had chased out the Belgian officials and run the country to suit themselves. Still worse, there were certain cannibal tribes moving like a swarm of locusts through Central Africa, eating the settled nations. Lately the swarm had broken into the Rift, and as Grogan explored northward he found the forest full of corpses. Here and there lurked starving fugitives, but despite their frantic warnings he moved on until he came to a wide province of desolated farms and ruined villages. Seeing that he had but a dozen followers a mob of cannibals attacked at night; but as they rushed, six fell to the white man’s rifle, and when the rest fled he picked them off at the range of a mile, as long as he could find victims. Then he entered a house where they had been feasting. “A cloud of vultures hovering over, the spot gave me an inkling of what I was about to see; but the realization defies description; it haunts me in my dreams, at dinner it sits on my leg-of-mutton, it bubbles in my soup, in fine, Watonga (the negro gun bearer) would not eat the potatoes that grew in the same country.”