Imagine a boundless rock-strewn plain, broken here and there by low hills, dominated by the rock of Chitor and bisected by a single, metre-gauge railway track running into the Infinite, and unrelieved by even a way-inspector’s trolly. In the fore-ground put a brand-new dak-bungalow furnished with a French bedstead and nothing else; and, in the verandah, place an embarrassed Englishman, smiling into the open mouth of an idiotic female elephant. But Gerowlia could not live on smiles alone. Finding that no food was forthcoming, she shut her mouth and renewed her attempts to get into the verandah and ate more _moonj_ string. To say “H!” to an elephant is a misdirected courtesy. It quickens the pace, and, if you flick her on the trunk with a wet towel, she curls the trunk out of harm’s way. Special education is necessary. A little breechless boy passed, carrying a lump of stone. “Hit on the feet, Sahib!” said he; “Hit on the feet!” Gerowlia had by this time nearly scraped off her pad and there were no signs of the _mahout_. The Englishman went out and found a tent-peg, and returning, in the extremity of his wrath, smote her bitterly on the nails of the near forefoot. Then, as Rider Haggard used to say--though the expression was patented by at least one writer before he made it his own--a curious thing happened. Gerowlia held up her foot to be beaten, and made the most absurd noises--squawked, in fact, exactly like an old lady who has narrowly escaped being run over. She backed out of the verandah, still squawking, on three feet and in the open held up near and off forefoot alternately to be beaten. It was very pitiful, for one swing of her trunk could have knocked the Englishman flat. He ceased whacking her, but she squawked for some minutes and then fell placidly asleep in the sunshine. When the _mahout_ returned, he beat her for breaking her tether exactly as the Englishman had done, but much more severely, and the ridiculous old thing hopped on three legs for fully five minutes. “Come along, Sahib!” said the _mahout_, “I will show this mother of bastards who is the _mahout_. Fat daughter of the Devil, sit down! You would eat string, would you? How does the iron taste?” And he gave Gerowlia a headache, which affected her temper all through the afternoon. She set off, across the railway line which runs below the rock of Chitor, into broken ground cut up with _nullahs_ and covered with low scrub, over which it would have been difficult to have taken a sure-footed horse--so fragmentary and disconnected was its nature. XI. _Proves conclusively the Existence of the Dark Tower visited by Childe Rolande, and of “Bogey” who frightens Children._