that of
the richest-throated bell that ever boomed in all the world. I remember
becoming aware that it was the signal for the rolling up of some vast
proscenium, revealing behind it a stage that was the world--nothing
less.

What did I see? What did I see? Let me try to recall and record.

First of all something chaotic. Great rushes of vapour driven by mighty
winds; great seas, for the most part calm. Then upheavals and volcanoes
spouting fire. Then tropic scenes of infinite luxuriance. Terrific
reptiles feeding on the brinks of marshes, and huge elephant-like
animals moving between palms beyond. Then, in a glade, rough huts and
about them a jabbering crowd of creatures that were only half human, for
sometimes they stood upright and sometimes ran on their hands and feet.
Also they were almost covered with hair which was all they had in
the way of clothes, and at the moment that I met them, were terribly
frightened by the appearance of a huge mammoth, if that is the right
name for it, which walked into the glade and looked at us. At any rate
it was a beast of the elephant tribe which I judged to be nearly twenty
feet high, with enormous curving tusks.

The point of the vision was that I recognized myself among those hairy
jabberers, not by anything outward and visible, but by something inward
and spiritual. Moreover, I was being urged by a female of the race, I
can scarcely call her a woman, to justify my existence by tackling the
mammoth in her particular interest, or to give her up to someone who
would. In the end I tackled it, rushing forward with a weapon, I think
it was a sharp stone tied to a stick, though how I could expect to
hurt a beast twenty feet high with such a thing is more than I can
understand, unless perhaps the stone was poisoned.

At any rate the end was sudden. I threw the stone, whereat a great trunk
shot out from between the tusks and caught me. Round and round I went
in the air, reflecting as I did so, for I suppose at the time my normal
consciousness had not quite left me, that this was my first encounter
with the elephant Jana, also that it was very foolish to try to oblige a
female regardless of personal risk....

All became dark, as no doubt it would have done, but presently, that is
after a lapse of a great many thousands of years, or so it appeared to
me, light grew again. This time I was a black man living in something
not unlike a Kaffir kraal on the top of a hill.

There was s