I felt no exultation; I was ill at the sight, and weak and quite subdued. It was a pitiful, dreadful picture, with the two elephants like mounds of butchery, looming large in the middle distance, while down below were numerous wounded creatures creeping away toward the jungle. And the dying made sounds of moaning. Not far from where I had fallen, lay part of a long, red arm—Grin’s. The bombs had flung it nearly to the camp he had sought to betray. He must have been among the foremost of the Links who drove the elephants up the hill. I conjured back my vision of the charging force, at the second when the explosion created its havoc. I remembered the huge wild animals most distinctly, their trunks uplifted, their feet in awkward, active motion, while to right and left and almost on their heels, the Blacks surged up in their dance of death. I knew then that the destruction among them must have been tremendous, for the whole length of the trench had been covered thickly by their numbers, and the lateral force of the bursting mines, especially down the hill, had evidently swept the slope for rods. I shook my head as I realised the narrowness of my own escape. 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?”