Jake bounded up the side of the hull, droplets of sweat flying from his sodden hair, red-faced as he gasped at Gareth.
"You've got the gentle touch."
"With all women there is the psychological moment, old son, "Gareth explained, grinning with relief as he scrambled into the turret and Jake dropped behind the controls.
Jake gunned the motor, and Priscilla threw off her covering, of cut thorn branches. Her wheels spun in the loose sand of the ravine, blowing up a cloud of red dust, and she tore up the steep bank and lunged out into the open directly under the startled outstretched trunk of the elephant.
The old bull had by this stage suffered provocation sufficient to take him to the edge of a blind, black rage. It needed only this new buzzing frightfulness to launch him over the edge. The leisurely pace that he had set up until now left his mountainous strength and endurance untouched, and now he trumpeted, a ringing ear-splitting challenge that rolled across the vast silences of the desert like the trumpet of doom. His ears curled back against his skull and with his trunk coiled against his chest, he crashed forward into a terrible ground-shaking charge.
His speed over the broken ground was greater than that of Priscilla the Pig, and he bore down upon her like a cliff of grey granite huge, menacing and indestructible.
The Captain of tanks had been shepherding the old elephant along gently. He did not want him to tax his strength. He wanted to deliver to his commanding officer an animal in the peak of its anger and destructive capabilities.
He was sitting up in his turret, chuckling and shaking his head with anticipation and growing delight, for the hunter's lines were only a mile or so ahead when suddenly, directly ahead of him, the ground erupted and an armoUred car roared out in a cloud of red dust. It was of a model that the Captain had seen only in illustrated books of military history like an apparition out of the remote past.
It took him some seconds to believe what he was seeing, then with a jarring impact on his already highly strung nerve ends, he recognized the enemy colours that the ancient machine was flying.
"Advance!" he screamed. "Squadron, advance!" and he groped instinctively at his side for his sword. "Engage the enemy." On each side of him his tanks roared forward, and for want of a sword, the Captain tore his helmet off and waved it over his head.
"Charge!" he screamed. "Forward into battle!" Now at last he was not a mere game-beater. Now he was a warrior leading his men into action.
His excitement was So contagious and the dust thrown up by the car, the elephant and the steel tracks so thick, that the first two tanks did not even see the fifteen-foot-deep sheer-sided ravine.
Running side by side, they went into it at the top of their speed and were destroyed effectively as though they had been demolished by a 100 kilo, aerial bomb, the riding wheels ripped away by the impact and the heavy steel tracks flying loose and snaking viciously into the air like living angry cobras. The revolving turrets were torn from their seatings, neatly bisecting the men at the waist, who stood in the hatches, as though with a gigantic pair of scissors.
Clinging to the rim of his own turret and peering backwards, Gareth saw the two machines disappear into the earth, and the great leaping towers of dust that rose high into the air to mark their destruction.
"Two down" he shouted.
"But another four to go," Jake shouted back grimly, fighting Priscilla over the rough earth. "And how about that jumbo?"
"How indeed!" The elephant, goaded on by the roar of engines and crash of steel behind and by the buzzing bouncing car ahead of it, was making incredible speed over the broken scrubby plain.
"He's right here with us," Gareth told Jake anxiously. So close was the great beast that Gareth had to look up at it, and he saw the thick grey. trunk uncoiling from its chest and reaching out to pluck him from the turret.
"As fast as you like, old son, or you'll have him sitting on your head."
"I have told that idiot not to run the game down on the guns so hard," snapped the Count petulantly. "I -have told him a dozen times, have I not, Gino?"
"Indeed, my Count."
"Run them hard at the beginning, then bring them in gently for the last mile or so. "The Count took an angry gulp at his glass. "The man is a fool, an insufferable fool and I can't abide fools around me." "Indeed not, my Count. I shall send him back to Massawa-" the rest of the threat trailed away, and the Count sat suddenly upright, the canvas chair creaking under his weight.
"Gino," he murmured uneasily. "There is something very strange taking place out there." Both of them peered anxiously out through the rifle slots in the thatched wall of the blind at the billowing dust clouds that raced down upon them with quite alarming speed.
"Gino, is it possible?" asked the Count.
"No, my Count," Gino assured him, but without any true conviction.
"It is the mirage. It is not possible."
"Are you certain, Gino?" The Count's voice "took on a strident edge.
"No, my Count."
"Nor am I, Gino. What does it look like to you?"
"It looks like,- Geno's voice choked off. "I do not like to say, my Count," he whispered. "I think I am going mad." At that moment the Captain of tanks, whose efforts to catch up with the fleeing armoured car and stampeding elephant were unavailing, opened fire with the 50 men.
Spandau upon them. More accurately, he opened fire in the general direction of the rolling dust cloud which obscured his forward vision, and through which he caught only occasional glimpses of beast and machine. To confound further the aim of his gunner, the range was rapidly increasing, the manoeuvres with which the armoured car was trying to throw off the close pursuit of the elephant were violent and erratic, and the cavalry tank itself was plunging and leaping wildly over the rough ground.
Fire!" shouted the Captain. "Keep firing," and his gunner sent half a dozen high-explosive shells screeching low over the plain. The other tanks heard the banging of their Captain's cannon and immediately and enthusiastically followed his example.
One of the first shells struck the thatched front wall of the blind in which the Count and Gino cowered in horrified fascination.
The flimsy wall of grass did not trigger the fuse of the shell so there was no explosion, but nevertheless the high-velocity shell passed not eighteen inches from the Count's left ear, with a crack of disrupted air that stunned him, before exiting through the rear wall of the blind and howling onwards to burst a mile out in the empty desert.
"If the Count no longer needs me-" Gino snapped a hasty salute and before the Count had recovered his wits enough to forbid it, he had dived through the shell hole in the rear wall of the blind and hit the ground on the far side, already running.
Gino was not alone. From each of the blinds along the line leapt the figures of the other hunters, the sound of their hysterical cries almost drowned by the roar of engines, the trumpeting of an angry bull elephant and the continuous thudding roar of cannon fire.
The Count tried to rise from his chair, but his legs betrayed him and he managed only a series of convulsive leaps. His mouth gaped wide in his deathly pale face, but no sound came out of it. The Count was beyond speech, almost beyond movement just the strength for one more desperate heave, and the chair toppled forward, throwing the Count face down upon the sunken earth floor of the blind, where he covered his head with both arms.
At that instant, the armoured car, still under full throttle, came in through the front wall. The thatched blind exploded around it, but the impetus of the car's charge was sufficient to carry it in a single leap over the dugout. The spinning wheels hurled inches over the Count's prostrate form, showering him with a stinging barrage of sand and loose gravel. Then it was gone.