The meal over and the after-dinner cigar duly smoked, Sir Reginald and his companion elephant-hunters having declared that they were too tired to enjoy any further sport that day, the professor and Mildmay bade the rest of the party good-night, and, taking their rifles, set out for the margin of the lake. As a matter of fact, they ought to have started nearly three hours earlier than they did, and taken up their position before nightfall, for many animals drink almost immediately after sunset, and before the light has entirely gone out of the sky; but they hoped to be still in time to get a shot, and hurried on, encouraged by the sounds that floated down to them from the lake telling of animals still there, drinking and bathing. The bathers were most probably elephants, but the pair decided not to interfere with them, arguing that, after all, they were not ivory hunters, and that their object was the acquisition of new or rare trophies, rather than an indiscriminate collection of skins, horns, tusks, and what not. Von Schalckenberg, indeed, declared that if he could not get a unicorn he did not want anything. Their progress was slow, for although the sky was cloudless and studded with stars that beamed with a clear, mellow radiance and brilliancy unknown in the more humid atmosphere of the temperate zones, the light that they afforded was sufficient only to reveal to the two men the clumps of bush and other objects close at hand. Moreover the grass was long and matted enough to demand the expenditure of a considerable amount of exertion to force a passage through it, and the night was close and very hot. To traverse the half-mile between the ship and the margin of the lake cost them, therefore, nearly twenty minutes of toilsome walking. At length, however, the professor, who, as the more experienced hunter, was leading the way, murmured-- "Ah! there is the water at last, thank goodness! And now, my friend, we must `go slow,' as you say, and be careful where we put our feet, or we may stumble unawares over something that we have no desire to meet at quite such close quarters."