Page:First Footsteps in East Africa, 1894 - Volume 1.djvu/204

 the Mullah, waxing bold in the very joy of his heart. "Of a truth I do!" was my reply. Nothing abashed, he hammered his mule with heel, and departed ejaculating, "What hath man but a single life? and he who throweth it away, what is he but a fool?" Then we advanced with cocked guns, Beuh singing, Boanerges- like, the Song of the Elephant. In the Somali country, as amongst the Kafirs, after murdering a man or boy, the death of an elephant is considered the act of heroism: most tribes wear for it the hair-feather and the ivory bracelet. Some hunters, like the Bushmen of the Cape [30], kill the Titan of the forests with barbed darts carrying Waba-poison. The general way of hunting resembles that of the Abyssinian Agageers described by Bruce. One man mounts a white pony, and galloping before the elephant, induces him, as he readily does, --firearms being unknown,--to charge and "chivy." The rider directs his course along, and close to, some bush, where a comrade is concealed; and the latter, as the animal passes at speed, cuts the back sinew of the hind leg, where in the human subject the tendon Achilles would be, with a sharp, broad and heavy knife. [31] This wound at first occasions little inconvenience: presently the elephant, fancying, it is supposed, that a thorn has stuck in his foot, stamps violently, and rubs the scratch till the sinew is fairly divided. The animal, thus disabled,