“You mean the morose-looking man with the thick beard?” asked the chief, meaning Cavius; the young Hellene affirmed the correctness of his supposition.
“I also want to have a talk with him, tell him to come to me,” said the old man. “I suppose you’re in a hurry to tell your companions that we are willing to help them. When we appoint the day of the hunt you will be informed.” The old chief dismissed the two friends with a gesture.
To the menacing rumble of tom-toms the tribesmen assembled for the hunt. Some of them were mounted on elephants, loaded with ropes, food and water, the remainder went on foot. Pandion, Kidogo and Cavius, armed with their heavy spears, joined the latter party. Two hundred hunters crossed the river and set out across the plains in a northerly direction, making for a range of bare stony hills faintly visible in the blue haze above the horizon. The hunters moved so fast that even such experienced walkers as our three friends had difficulty in keeping pace with them.
The ground that lay to the south and east of the range of hills was perfectly flat, with huge expanses of level, burnt-up grassland. The wind raised clouds of dust over the yellow plain, obscuring the dull greenery of the trees and bushes. The nearer cliffs were clearly visible, but the rocks beyond them were almost hidden by a greyish-blue mist. Steep rounded peaks jutted up like the skulls of gigantic, phantom elephants; while the lower rocks were hunched up like the backs of huge crocodiles.
The Elephant People spent the night under the southern end of the chain of rocks and at dawn moved off along their eastern slope. Over the plain ahead of them hung a reddish mirage in which quivered the diffused silhouettes of trees. An extensive swamp spread away to the north. A young man left the hunting party and ordered the three strangers to follow him up the rocky ridge.
Cavius, Pandion and Kidogo climbed up to a ledge two hundred cubits higher than the surrounding plain. Over their heads rose a sheer stone precipice that breathed intense heat, its bright yellow surface scored by the zigzags of numerous cracks. The hunter led the friends to another ledge that overlooked the swamp, ordered them to take cover behind tufts of coarse grass and stones, made a sign implying silence and left them.
For a long time the three friends lay still under the blazing sun, not daring to say a word. Not a sound came from the valley that spread out below them.
Suddenly from the left faint squelchy noises came floating towards them, growing louder as they drew nearer. From behind his stone Pandion looked out cautiously through the scarcely moving grass and held his breath.
The dark grey cloud of thousands of elephants covered the swamp. The huge animals were crossing it diagonally from the side of the rocks and, passing over the boundary between swamp and grassland, were making for the south-east.
The bodies of the animals stood cut clearly against the yellowish-grey grass. They were moving in herds with anything from a hundred to five hundred head in each, herd following herd with a short interval between them. Each herd formed a solid mass of animals pressed close against each other; viewed from above, it looked like the movement of a grey island whose surface, undulating with hundreds of backs, was scarred by the white streaks of the tusks.
In the swampy places the herd stretched out in a thin line. Some of the elephants left the herd, ran to one side and stood there spreading their great ears and placing their hind-legs apart in a funny way; they soon, however, rejoined the general stream.
Some of them, mostly the huge bulls, moved unhurriedly, their heads and ears lowered; others advanced gravely, holding the forepart of the body high and crisscrossing their hind-legs; a third kind waddled along sideways, their thin tails jutting up above them. Tusks of the most varied shapes and sizes — some short, others so long that they almost reached the ground, some curved upwards and others quite straight — flashed white against the grey background.
Kidogo brought his lips close to Pandion’s ear. “The elephants are moving towards the swamps and rivers,” he said. “The grasslands are burnt up.” “Where are the hunters?” Pandion asked. “They are waiting in hiding for a herd that contains a lot of young elephants; such herds are always at the end. You can see there are only full-grown elephants here.”
“Why is it some elephants have long tusks and others short?”
“The short ones are broken.”
“Fighting amongst themselves?”
“I have bean told that elephants rarely fight amongst themselves. They mostly break their tusks when they pull up trees. They use their tusks to overturn trees so that they can eat the fruits, leaves and thin twigs. The forest elephants have much stronger tusks than the plains elephants; that’s why hard ivory goes to the markets from the forests and soft ivory from the plains.”
“Are these forest or plains elephants?”
“They’re plains elephants. Look for yourself.” Kidogo pointed to an old elephant that was hanging back not far from the rocks where the friends were hiding.
The grey giant, knee-high in the grass, turned directly towards the watching friends. Its ears were spread out widely on either side, their skin stretched taut like sails. The elephant lowered its head. This movement brought the animal’s sloping forehead forward, deep pits appeared between the eyes and the crown of the head, and the whole head took on the appearance of a heavy pillar that tapered towards the bottom, unnoticeably changing to the vertically pendant trunk. Deep transverse folds, like dark rings, marked the trunk at regular intervals. At the base of the trunk two tubes jutted out at a sharp angle on either side, from which very short and thick tusks spread outwards.
“I can’t understand how you knew that it was a plains elephant,” whispered Pandion after carefully examining the calm old giant.
“Do you see his tusks? They’re not broken, they’re worn away. They don’t grow on an old elephant like they do on one in the prime of his life, and he has worn them away because they are soft. You never see such tusks on a forest elephant, they are mostly long and thin.”
The friends conversed softly. Time passed and the leading elephants disappeared beyond the horizon, the entire herd turning into a dark strip.
From the left came still another herd. At its head marched four bull elephants of enormous size, almost eight cubits high. They waved their heads as they walked, their long, slightly curved tusks rising and falling and at times touching the grass with their sharp points.
There were many cows in the herd; these could be distinguished by their sunken backs and the huge folds of skin on their flanks. Baby elephants, pressing close to the hind-legs of the cows, toddled along uncertainly; while to one side, keeping to themselves, was the merry throng of the elephant youth. Their tiny tusks and ears, their small long heads, their big stomachs and the equal length of their fore- and hind-legs distinguished them from the grown-ups.
The friends realized that the decisive moment of the hunt had come. It was difficult for the baby elephants to march through the swamp, and the herd moved farther to the right on to a strip of hard ground between the bushes and occasional trees.
“Why is it that such a heavy animal as the elephant doesn’t get stuck in the swamps?” asked Pandion.
“They have special feet,” began Kidogo, “they…”
A thunderous noise, made by the hunters banging on sheets of metal and tom-toms, accompanied by their frenzied howls, spread so suddenly across the plain that the friends gasped in amazement.
The elephant herd, panic-stricken, rushed for the swamp only to find there another line of men with tomtoms and trumpets that rose out of the grass. The leading elephants held back, checking the pressure from those behind. The piercing trumpeting of the frightened elephants, the thunder of metal sheets, the crackle of breaking branches — through all that hellish noise the thin, plaintive whine of the calves could occasionally be heard. The animals dashed here and there, at first bunching together, then again spreading out. The figures of the men could be seen in the dust clouds in the midst of that chaos of milling giants. The hunters did not approach the herd but ran from place to place, reformed their ranks and again beat their metal sheets. Gradually the friends began to understand what the hunters were doing; they were cutting the young elephants off from the adults and forcing them to the right into the open mouth of a dry watercourse that cut into the stone cliff and was protected by a strip of forest. The grey giants ran after the hunters, trying to trample on enemies that had appeared from they knew not where. The men, however, leaping high into the air, hid in the bushes and behind the trees. While the infuriated animals were waving their trunks and seeking their hidden enemies, new rows of hunters, screaming wildly and rattling their metal sheets, appeared from the other side. The elephants turned on the newcomers who repeated the same manoeuvre in an effort to cut off the young elephants.