Page:In brightest Africa.djvu/47

 I got up in the morning and had breakfast before daybreak. The elephants had moved on down the edge of the forest. What had been a jungle of high grass and bush the day before was trampled flat. There were at least seven hundred elephants in the herd—government officials had counted them on the previous day as they came down. I followed the trails to the edge of the forest but saw none. I started back to cross a little nullah (a dry water course), but felt suspicious and decided to look the situation over a little more closely. I ran up on a sloping rock and, almost under me on the other side, I saw the back of a large elephant. Over to one side there was another one, beyond that another, and then I realized that the little nullah through which I had planned to pass was very well sprinkled with them. I backed off and went up to a higher rock to one side. Elephants were drifting into the forest from all directions. The sun was just coming up over the hills and was shining upon the forest, which sparkled in the sunlight—morning greetings to the forest people. The monkeys greeted one another with barks and coughs. Everything was waking up—it was a busy day. There was not a breath of air. I had gone back a million years; the birds were calling back and forth, the monkeys were calling to one another, a troop of chimpanzees in the open screamed, and their shouts were answered from another group inside the forest. All the forest life was awake and moving about as that huge herd of elephants, singly and in groups, flowed into the forest from the plain. There was one