[Illustration: AT THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF] Through the leafy screen of the forest a hundred yards away there had emerged a large elephant, plunging forward at a lumbering gallop with trunk uplifted. In another fraction of a second the whole of the light timber and brushwood at the edge of the forest appeared to dissolve, and a wild mob of scores of elephants burst like an enormous breaker upon the open space. Petrified for a moment with amazement, the two Englishmen became suddenly alive to their peril. Whether they went on in the direction intended, or returned to their men, they would equally cut across the front of this stampeding herd and must be overwhelmed. "Straight for the edge of the cliff!" cried Royce. They dropped their rifles and dashed to the right. It was forty or fifty yards to the edge of the cliff; the elephants were already only about half that distance behind them, gaining moment by moment. The ground shook under the tremendous charge of the maddened beasts. To the fleeing men it seemed that the breath from the gaping mouths scorched them. A small spur of the cliff jutted to the left. The runners swung round on to this and without a moments' pause took a header into the lake twenty feet below. When they came up to the surface they had to fight for breath in a cauldron of broken water. They were both good swimmers, or they would never have survived the sort of Niagara swirl in which they were now hurled about and buffeted. Only their instinctive leap to the left before they made the dive had saved them from destruction. It had prevented the elephants from falling on top of them, for some of the great beasts, charging straight ahead in a blind fury, had plunged headlong over the brink into the lake. The turmoil of the water soon subsided, and the swimmers, on regaining the use of their faculties, found themselves in the company of the scattered herd, all swimming in search of a landing-place. In a few moments Royce caught at a branch of an overhanging tree, and both he and Challis drew themselves up among the foliage, and watched the ungainly animals swim by. "Hope it's cooled their rage," said Royce in gasps. "We've had a narrow squeak." "Yes, indeed! Under several tons of elephant flesh we should have been pretty well flattened out. What made them stampede, I wonder?" "Our scent, perhaps. I hope they weren't started by the Tubus." "We had better get back. It will be rather a feat to climb the cliff, by the look of it." They crept along the tree to the place where it sprang from the cliff, then clambered up the steep face with the aid of straggling plants and knobby projections. When their heads appeared over the edge, there were loud shouts of joy, and John came rushing up at the head of the whole party of negroes. "Fink you gone dead, sah," he said, his broad face beaming. "All alive and safe and sound, and always merry and bright. Yoi-aloo! Hurray!"