attern Unyoro march, of only
two hours' duration. On arrival at the end we heard that elephants had
been seen close by. Grant and I then prepared our guns, and found a herd
of about a hundred feeding on a plain of long grass, dotted here and
there by small mounds crowned with shrub. The animals appeared to be all
females, much smaller than the Indian breed; yet though ten were fired
at, none were killed, and only one made an attempt to charge. I was with
the little twin Manua at the time, when, stealing along under cover of
the high grass, I got close to the batch and fired at the larges, which
sent her round roaring. The whole of them then, greatly alarmed, packed
together and began sniffing the air with their uplifted trunks, till,
ascertaining by the smell of the powder that their enemy was in front of
them, they rolled up their trunks and came close to the spot where I was
lying under a mound. My scent then striking across them, they pulled up
short, lifted their heads high, and looked down sideways on us. This
was a bad job. I could not get a proper front shot at the boss of any of
them, and if I had waited an instant we should both have been picked
up or trodden to death; so I let fly at their temples, and instead of
killing, sent the whole of them rushing away at a much faster pace than
they came. After this I gave up, because I never could separate the
ones I had wounded from the rest, and thought it cruel to go on damaging
more. Thinking over it afterwards, I came to the conclusion I ought to
have put in more powder; for I had, owing to their inferior size to
the Indian ones, rather despised them, and fired at them with the same
charge and in the same manner as I always did at rhinoceros. Though
puzzled at the strange sound of the rifle, the elephants seldom ran far,
packed in herd, and began to graze again. Frij, who was always ready at
spinning a yarn, told us with much gravity that two of my men, Uledi and
Wadi Hamadi, deserters, were possessed of devils (Phepo) at Zanzibar.
Uledi, not wishing to be plagued by his Satanic majesty's angels on the
march, sacrificed a cow and fed the poor, according to the great Phepo's
orders, and had been exempted from it; but Wadi Hamadi, who preferred
taking his chance, had been visited several times: once at Usui, when
he was told the journey would be prosperous, only the devil wanted one
man's life, and one man would fall sick; which proved true, for Hassani
was murdered, a