The sun rose higher. Thirst tormented the three friends, and they were racked with fever from their wounds. Kidogo and Cavius had decided to go in search of water when they suddenly heard voices. Three elephants with warriors on their backs were moving across the plain below the stony slope on which the friends had met the terror of the night. The Elephant People, hearing Kidogo’s shouts, turned their elephants towards them and set them at a faster pace. The elephants were approaching the three strangers when they suddenly shied and began trumpeting uneasily, raising their trunks and spreading their ears. The warriors jumped down from their platforms and ran towards the dead monster with cries of “Gishu! Gishu!”
Yesterday’s chief hunter gave the three friends a look of approval and said with a catch in his hoarse voice:
“You are indeed famous warriors if the three of you alone could overcome the terror of the night, the eater of the thick-skinned animals.”
The Elephant People told the three friends about the gishu, a very rare and dangerous animal. Nobody knew where it lay hidden by day, but during the night it wandered about in silence, attacking young elephants, rhinoceroses and the young of other big animals. The gishu was exceptionally strong and stubborn in battle. Its terrible teeth could bite off the leg of an elephant at one snap, and its powerful forepaws crushed its victims, breaking their bones.
Cavius made signs asking the hunters to help him skin the animal. Four warriors willingly set about the task, paying no attention to the horrible stench.
The skin and the head were lifted on to an elephant, where the three friends were also lifted by the warriors. The elephants, obedient to light blows of their drivers’ hooked knives, set out at a smart trot and in a short time covered the distance to the village, which they reached by midday. The villagers greeted them with shouts of welcome; from the height of the elephants’ backs the warriors shouted out, announcing the details of the great deed of valour.
Kidogo, his face beaming, sat proudly beside Pandion on the wide swaying elephant platform, five cubits above the earth. The Negro had started singing several times, but each time the Elephant People had stopped him, warning him that the elephants did not like noise and were accustomed to moving in silence.
Four days journey separated them from the village of the Elephant People. The chief had kept his word, and the party of former slaves was allowed to follow the tribe’s expedition to the west. As their wounds had not yet healed, Pandion, Cavius and Kidogo were given a place on one of the six elephants and their sixteen companions followed behind on foot. The elephants marched only half the day, the remainder of the time being required to feed and rest them. Those who were following on foot, however, could only overtake the elephants by nightfall.
The elephant drivers did not select for their charges the way that the people would have chosen for themselves. They avoided forests with stands of tall trees and crashed their way through bush country where the undergrowth was so thick that the men would have had to hack their way through. From time to time the leading elephant was changed and sent to the rear to rest. The elephants left a path behind them along which the liberated slaves marched without a single blow of a knife full of admiration at the ease with which the impenetrable thickets were crushed underfoot. The three friends on the elephant were even better off. The platform on which they sat swayed slightly as it floated continuously over the ground with its thorn-bushes, insects and dangerous snakes, stretches of foul, stinking mud, sharp stones on rocky slopes, grass that cut the feet, and deep, gaping crevices. Only now did Pandion realize the great care that had to be exercised by a traveller on foot through the African jungles and bushlands. Constant vigilance was necessary for a man to remain uninjured and preserve his strength and fighting ability for the journey ahead of him.
The elephants strode on through all obstacles with the reliability of granite blocks, and Pandion had ample time to drink in the beauty of this strange country, its colour, form and aromas, the magnificence of its plant and animal life. In the glaring sunlight of the glades the pure tones of the flowers attained such extraordinary brilliance that to Pandion’s northern eye there seemed to be something vaguely wrong with them. The glaring colour sequences seemed harsh and dissonant when compared with the soft, harmonious colours of his native Hellas. But whenever clouds covered the sky or the party plunged into the deep twilight of the shady forests this- galaxy of colour disappeared.
The party cut across an outjutting spur of the forest and found themselves in open, hilly, red-soil country where they again saw the leafless trees that exuded milky sap. Their bluish-green branches stretched mournfully into the blinding glare of the sky; the tops looked as if they had been deliberately trimmed straight some thirty cubits from the ground. The thick trunks and leafless branches had the appearance of candelabra cast from some green metal. Huge blossoms, glowing red at the tips of the branches, gave one the impression of hundreds of torches burning in a sunless cemetery. There was neither beast nor bird to disturb the deathlike stillness of the tropical heat in these motionless thickets.-
Farther on the soil was scarred by deep watercourses with dazzling white sand where the red soil had been washed away. The travellers entered a labyrinth of narrow gullies whose friable purple walls rose to a height of a hundred cubits on either side. The elephants picked their way carefully through a maze of eroded cliffs, pyramids, turrets and frail pillars. Now and again they passed through deep depressions, round like bowls, in which spurs of different soil spread radially across the level floor. These spurs formed steep sharp walls of friable earth that sometimes collapsed as the party passed by, frightening the elephants, who shied away from them. The colour of the eroded earth was constantly changing; a wall of warm red tones would give way to one of light brown which, in turn, was followed by bright yellow pyramids interspersed with strips and ledges of dazzling white. It seemed to Pandion that he had entered a fairy kingdom. These deep, dry and lifeless canyons hid a wealth of colour contrasts, the iridescence of inanimate nature.
Again came densely wooded ridges, again the green walls hemmed in the travellers, and the elephant platform was like an island floating slowly over a sea of leaves and branches.
Pandion noticed how carefully the drivers led their elephants, and how carefully they examined the animals’ skin at halts. When he asked one of them why they did this, the Negro placed his hand on a gourd that hung at his belt.
“It’s a bad thing for an elephant to graze its skin or injure it in any way,” said the driver. “If he does his blood turns bad and the animal soon dies. We have medicinal pitch we always keep at hand to treat all injuries without delay.”
The young Hellene was astonished to learn that the powerful, long-lived giants were so vulnerable, but then he realized why the wise old animals were so careful.
The elephants took a lot of looking after. The sites of the night’s bivouac and resting places were selected with great care after a lengthy examination of the country and numerous consultations; the tethered elephants were surrounded by keen-eyed watchmen, who kept awake the whole night through. Special reconnaissance parties were sent out far ahead to make sure that there were no wild elephants in the neighbourhood, and if any were met with, they were driven off with loud cries.