"After all, the thought of a slap at some wild game was tempting enough, the judge appearing to consider anyone but a sportsman nobody at all; so up we went behind him out of the gully till we were all blowing like so many porpoises on the head of it, Sir Charles raising his finger as we peeped across a grassy slope right under us, where a whole drove of small slender-legged antelopes were feeding. We had just time to rest, getting a breath of air off the heights, when one of the foremost lifted its head, listening the opposite way from us; next moment the entire scatter of them came sweeping direct over to leeward in a string--we could almost catch their bright black eyes through the grass, when the crack of our seven barrels turned them bolt off at a corner, and they were gone like wind on water. All of us had missed save Sir Charles Hyde, but his rifle-bullet had sent one of the antelopes springing up in the air ten feet or so, rolling over and over into the grass again, where we found it lying with its tongue out, and its large eye glazing amidst the blades and dust--a pair of huge turkey buzzards falling, as it were, out of two specks in the sun above us, already, and rising with an ugly flap while we got round the dead creature.
"Hallo!' said the mid suddenly, looking back over toward the hollow we'd come out of, 'what's that?'
"From where we stood we could just see through the wild cane to the mouth of the gully, half-a-mile down or more, leading upon the trees by the lagoon. I thought I could hear a dull heavy sound now and then going thump thump down the hollow and along it, the stones rumbling from one spot to another at the root of the hill; but noticing a light smoke rising farther into the course of the creek, with a faint echo of axes at work somewhere in the woods below, I wasn't sorry to find the timberers were still in the river, showing we weren't the only civilised folks that thought it fit to visit. Perhaps it might have been a quarter of an hour or more, however, and we were all looking out sharp for birds of any kind to pop at, happening to turn my head, I saw the long reeds were moving about the banks below and the trees twisting about furiously, and no sooner had I made a few paces than good heavens!--right in the break of the trees at the landing-place--_there_ was a huge brute of some sort coming slowly up out of the water; then another, and another, glistening wet in the bright light as the shadow of the branches slipped behind them. A blindness came over my eyes, and I had scarce time to make out the big block-like heads and moving trunks of five or six black African elephants, ere the whole case flashed upon me, and away I dashed full-speed down the slope. The big beasts were turning quietly off into the hollow, and two or three of their calves trotted after them out of the bushes, munching the young cane-stalks as they lifted their pillars of legs and their tufty little tails, when I passed a fire of sticks blazing under a slab of rock, with the judge's guinea-fowl plucked and roasting before it from a string, the bowman's tarpaulin and his pipe lying near by--a sight that doubled the horror in me, to know he had left the boat at all; and no doubt, as I thought, taken fright and run off, man-o'war's-man though he was. I made three springs over the stones down to the water, terrified to look in, hearing it, as I did, splash and wash about the sides, up among the leaves of the trees, while a couple of monstrous brutes were to be seen by the light in the midst of it, still wallowing about, and seeming to enjoy sending the whole pool in wide rings and waves as far as it would go, with the noise besides; the one-half swimming and the biggest standing aground as he poured the water out of his long trunk all over his back, then broke off a branch and waved it to and fro like a fan round his flapping leathery ears.