sleeping in
peace while, perched like a wounded vulture on a tree, I watched for his
welfare in wakeful sorrow; and once more he collapsed, and owned that my
words were 'sharp but just.'

"However, as I have said, confidence was completely restored; and that
evening everybody in the kraal, including the superannuated victim of
jealousy in the little hut where the mealie cobs were stored, went to
bed with a sense of sweet security from elephants and all other animals
that prowl by night.

"For my part, I pitched my camp below the kraal; and then, having
procured a beam of wood from the head man--rather a rotten one, by the
way--I set it across two boughs that ran out laterally from the baobab
tree, at a height of about twenty-five feet from the ground, in such
fashion that I and another man could sit upon it with our legs hanging
down, and rest our backs against the bole of the tree. This done I went
back to the camp and ate my supper. About nine o'clock, half-an-hour
before the moon-rise, I summoned Gobo, who, thinking that he had seen
about enough of the delights of big game hunting for that day, did not
altogether relish the job; and, despite his remonstrances, gave him my
eight-bore to carry, I having the .570-express. Then we set out for
the tree. It was very dark, but we found it without difficulty, though
climbing it was a more complicated matter. However, at last we got up
and sat down, like two little boys on a form that is too high for
them, and waited. I did not dare to smoke, because I remembered the
rhinoceros, and feared that the elephants might wind the tobacco if they
should come my way, and this made the business more wearisome, so I fell
to thinking and wondering at the completeness of the silence.

"At last the moon came up, and with it a moaning wind, at the breath of
which the silence began to whisper mysteriously. Lonely enough in the
newborn light looked the wide expanse of mountain, plain, and forest,
more like some vision of a dream, some reflection from a fair world of
peace beyond our ken, than the mere face of garish earth made soft with
sleep. Indeed, had it not been for the fact that I was beginning to find
the log on which I sat very hard, I should have grown quite sentimental
over the beautiful sight; but I will defy anybody to become sentimental
when seated in the damp, on a very rough beam of wood, and half-way up
a tree. So I merely made a mental note that it was a particularly lovel