“I crept up beside him. There knelt the bull as I had left him last night, and there too lay the other bulls.
“ ‘Do these elephants sleep?’ I whispered to the astonished Gobo.
“ ‘Yes, Macumazahn, they sleep.’
“ ‘Nay, Gobo, they are dead.’
“ ‘Dead? How can they be dead? Who killed them?’
“ ‘What do people call me, Gobo?’
“ ‘They call you Macumazahn.’
“ ‘And what does Macumazahn mean?’
“ ‘It means the man who keeps his eyes open, the man who gets up in the night.’
“ ‘Yes, Gobo, and I am that man. Look, you idle, lazy cowards; while you slept last night I rose, and alone I hunted those great elephants, and slew them by the moonlight. To each of them I gave one bullet and only one, and it fell dead. Look,’ and I advanced into the glade, ‘here is my spoor, and here is the spoor of the great bull charging after me, and there is the tree that I took refuge behind; see, the elephant shattered it in his charge. Oh, you cowards, you who would give up the chase while the blood spoor steamed beneath your nostrils, see what I did single-handed while you slept, and be ashamed.’
“ ‘Ou!’ said the men, ‘ou! Koos! Koos y umcool!’ (Chief, great Chief!) And then they held their tongues, and going up to the three dead beasts, gazed upon them in silence.
“But after that those men looked upon me with awe as being almost more than mortal. No mere man, they said, could have slain those three elephants alone in the nighttime. I never had any further trouble with them. I believe that if I had told them to jump over a precipice and that they would take no harm, they would have believed me.
“Well, I went up and examined the bulls. Such tusks as they had I never saw and never shall see again. It took us all day to cut them out; and when they reached Delagoa Bay, as they did ultimately, though not in my keeping, the single tusk of the big bull scaled one hundred and sixty pounds, and the four other tusks averaged ninety-nine and a half pounds—a most wonderful, indeed an almost unprecedented, lot of ivory.3 Unfortunately I was forced to saw the big tusk in two, otherwise we could not have carried it.”
“Oh, Quatermain, you barbarian!” I broke in here, “the idea of spoiling such a tusk! Why, I would have kept it whole if I had been obliged to drag it myself.”
“Oh yes, young man,” he answered, “it is all very well for you to talk like that, but if you had found yourself in the position which it was my privilege to occupy a few hours afterwards, it is my belief that you would have thrown the tusks away altogether and taken to your heels.”
“Oh,” said Good, “so that isn’t the end of the yarn? A very good yarn, Quatermain, by the way—I couldn’t have made up a better one myself.”
The old gentleman looked at Good severely, for it irritated him to be chaffed about his stories.
“I don’t know what you mean, Good. I don’t see that there is any comparison between a true story of adventure and the preposterous tales which you invent about ibex hanging by their horns. No, it is not the end of the story; the most exciting part is to come. But I have talked enough for tonight; and if you go on in that way, Good, it will be some time before I begin again.”
“Sorry I spoke, I’m sure,” said Good, humbly. “Let’s have a split to show that there is no ill-feeling.” And they did.
V
The Message of Maiwa
On the following evening we once more dined together, and Quatermain, after some pressure, was persuaded to continue his story—for Good’s remark still rankled in his breast.
“At last,” he went on, “a few minutes before sunset, the task was finished. We had laboured at it all day, stopping only once for dinner, for it is no easy matter to hew out five such tusks as those which now lay before me in a white and gleaming line. It was a dinner worth eating, too, I can tell you, for we dined off the heart of the great one-tusked bull, which was so big that the man whom I sent inside the elephant to look for his heart was forced to remove it in two pieces. We cut it into slices and fried it with fat, and I never tasted heart to equal it, for the meat seemed to melt in one’s mouth. By the way, I examined the jaw of the elephant; it never grew but one tusk; the other had not been broken off, nor was it present in a rudimentary form.
“Well, there lay the five beauties, or rather four of them, for Gobo and another man were engaged in sawing the grand one in two. At last with many sighs I ordered them to do this, but not until by practical experiment I had proved that it was impossible to carry it in any other way. One hundred and sixty pounds of solid ivory, or rather more in its green state, is too great a weight for two men to bear for long across a broken country. I sat watching the job and smoking the pipe of contentment, when suddenly the bush opened, and a very handsome and dignified native girl, apparently about twenty years of age, stood before me, carrying a basket of green mealies upon her head.
“Although I was rather surprised to see a native girl in such a wild spot, and, so far as I knew, a long way from any kraal, the matter did not attract my particular notice; I merely called to one of the men, and told him to bargain with the woman for the mealies, and ask her if there were any more to be bought in the neighbourhood. Then
