Page:The Song of the Sirens.djvu/163

 what you promise, what guarantee have we that the brutes will be any more tractable in a day or in ten? We don't know yet what the trouble is." He turned to the bevy of young nobles who acted as his unofficial staff orderlies.

"Find the head mahout," he commanded, "and fetch the interpreter."

Two of the mounted youths galloped off; the rest kept their fretful horses at a respectful distance behind the two generals, who from their knoll overlooked the hopeless confusion of the milling, heaving herd of squealing, recalcitrant elephants, the broad river and the tangled woods on the further side. The woods gave no token that fifty thousand men had vanished into them since dawn, but the other bank of the river, as far as they could see up and down it, was all ropy, greasy mud, puddled to a paste by the convulsive, frantic struggles of the back-slipping feet of the myriads of men, horses, mules and cattle which had scaled it only by the expenditure of their last fraction of strength. As Hannibal scanned the surface of the river, swirling with sullen eddies, he kept a tight rein on his fidgety little bay. Mago's reins lay on the neck of his tall sorrel, which he sat without visible effort, as comfortable as if he had been on a sofa.

The orderly who had sought the head mahout quickly brought him. He wagged his turban,