Page:In Desert and Wilderness (Sienkiewicz, tr. Drezmal).djvu/360

352 the thicket resounded the yelling of some hundred voices, after which silence fell. It was interrupted finally by the hollow but loud rumble of a drum, which did not cease even for a moment.

It was evidently a signal of the warriors for battle, for three hundred of them suddenly emerged from the thicket. All stood in a long row before the village. Stas stopped the King at the distance of one hundred paces and began to gaze at them. The sun illuminated their well-shaped forms, wide breasts, and powerful arms. They were armed with bows and spears. Around their thighs some had short skirts of heath, and some of monkey skin. Their heads were adorned with ostrich and parrot feathers, or great scalps torn off baboons' skulls. They appeared warlike and threatening, but they stood motionless and in silence, for their amazement was simply unbounded and subdued the desire for fighting. All eyes were fastened upon the King, on the white palanquin, and the white man sitting on his neck.

Nevertheless, an elephant was not an unknown animal to them. On the contrary, they continually live in dread of elephants, whole herds of which destroy at night their manioc fields as well as banana and doom-palm plantations. As the spears and arrows do not pierce the elephant's hide, the poor negroes fight the depredators with the help of fire, with the aid of cries imitating a cockerel's crow, by digging pits, and constructing traps made of the trunks of trees. But that an elephant should become slave of man and permit one to sit on his neck was something which none of them ever saw before, and it never entered into the mind of any of them that anything like that was possible. So the spectacle which was presented to them passed so far beyond their understanding and imagination that they did not know what to do: whether to fight