The Elephant obeyed trembling. He stood upon his feet. For one moment he saw with his mortal eyes It that had spoken; the next he was blinded by a flash; he saw no more, but he knew that in that instant he was turned into a rock where he was standing. His feet were sunk in the ground and his trunk extended before him was also rooted in the earth. All stone. Where his eyes were, only two slight chinks in the rock remained. But at the same moment the Elephant heard,--so faintly that he could hardly catch the sound--a last word from the voice:-- "Thus, but not forever. A Deliverer shall come and thou shalt mount up to the sky and dwell among the stars." That was what the Elephant heard. He heard nothing more but he could feel. He could feel himself a stone; that is a dreadful thing to feel. It was a heavy, crushing feeling; a dead weight always bearing him down. He could not lift it; he could not throw it off. It was forever crushing him down, down,--though he never really sank. But it was the same thing to him; he felt that he was sinking. But he had another evil to bear. A tree with its roots sunk in the ground all about him, stood directly over his head. That was a bitter suffering to him; he could feel it there. He knew that it was stretching its long arms into the air and waving its branches in the wind. He knew that its roots grappled his body and grew tighter fixed in the earth. The tree, indeed, died in time, but another took its place and the torment grew with it. For it kept in his mind the Squirrel he had killed. He could stolidly bear the crushing weight of the rock bringing remorse at the recollection of the happy river that he had made an angry brawling stream,--but the tree--it was a birch, the very kind that he had first devoured after the death of his mother, the tree, that moving with every breath of air, stirred in his mind the recollection of the Squirrel he had killed, who had loved him, saved him from death, and died beside for love of the river--the tree he thought he could not bear. But still through all his remorse and bitter anguish, the Elephant seemed to hear, though faintly, the last words spoken: "But not forever. A Deliverer shall come, and thou shalt mount the sky and dwell among the stars." This was the only slight ray of comfort, though he did not always remember it, but still when the morning sun arose and its beams fell upon the rock, it awakened the remembrance in the Elephant's mind, and he repeated to himself, "A Deliverer shall come." And sometimes in the deep and still night, the Aurora flushing in the north would lighten up a deeper and more cheering hope, for by it he thought would the Deliverer come.