reat bodies against the tree, the
trumpeting whose prolonged scream never ceased--all were nothing. His mind
was cast out--he had flung it away just as the elephant had flung
Berselius away. To him the universe was the tree to which he was clinging,
just that part which his arms encircled.

The herd had attacked in three columns, keeping the very same formation as
they had kept from the start. The northern column, consisting of cows with
their calves, drove on as if to safety, the others, cows and bulls--the
cows even more ferocious than the bulls--attacked the camps, the tents,
and the fire. They stamped and trod the fire out, smashing tent poles and
chop boxes, stores and cooking utensils, tusking one another in the
tight-packed _melee_, and the scream of the trumpeting never ceased.

Then they drove on.

The porters, all except two, had, unhappily for themselves, fled in a body
to the west, and now mixed with the trumpeting and thunder could be heard
the screams of men trodden under foot or tusked to pieces. These sounds
ceased, and the trumpeting died away, and nothing could be distinguished
but the dull boom, boom of the herd sweeping away west, growing fainter
and fainter, and dying away in the night.

CHAPTER XX

THE BROKEN CAMP

The whole thing had scarcely lasted twenty minutes. During the storming
and trumpeting, Adams, clinging to the tree, had felt neither terror nor
interest. His mind was cast out, all but a vestige of it; this remnant of
mind recognized that it was lying in the open palm of Death, and it was
not afraid. Not only that, but it felt lazily triumphant. It is only the
reasoning mind that fears death, the mind that can still say to itself,
"What will come after?" The intuitive mind, which does not reason, has no
fear.

Had not the herd been so closely packed and so furious, Adams would have
been smelt out, plucked from the tree and stamped to pieces without any
manner of doubt. But the elephants, jammed together, tusking each other,
and rooting the camp to pieces, had passed on, not knowing that they had
left a living man behind them.

As the sound of the storm died away, he came to his senses as a man comes
to his senses after the inhalation of ether, and the first thing that was
borne in upon him was the fact that he was clinging to a tree, and that he
could not let go. His arms encircled the rough bark like bands of iron;
they had divorced themselves from his will power, they