Simba and I ride after them. Watching our chance, we cut in between the pair, and by dashing back and forth in front of him, I bedevil Tembu Sheik into charging me. When after a hundred yards' run he gives up the chase, Simba's yelling and dogging drive him to another charge that carries him an equal distance into the mimosa woods. Our purpose is to get him out of the way; then we will give short shrift to his wounded comrade. Running away from the woods into the sun-baked plain, he cannot escape us now.
As we wheel away from Tembu Sheik, Tembu Emir strides a low hill. At once Simba raises his right arm and rides after him full pace. He remembers now what lies on the other side; but he is too late; and he had better rest his horse for the trial ahead.
It will be a mighty trial. Over the hill lies forty or fifty acres grown to heavy thorn bush and trees. Wounded, dying perhaps, the Death King of the Elephants has gone there to take revenge.
Sometimes my night dreams of adventure and conflict, usually involving hard riding or hard sailing, turn suddenly into nightmares. So it was with my fight with Tembu Emir. At the close of one tense but exhilarating moment, I was riding down a kind of avenue through the thorn bush looking for the monster, my main anxiety that we would lose him altogether, Simba skirting some thickets on my flank. At the beginning of the next moment I had run up on him and was instantly in desperate flight from him and seized by terror more profound than any my conscious brain had hitherto known.
It was unmitigated terror, unlit by hope. Countless thousands of men have felt its seizure in the second before they died: very few have lived to remember it because it can be caused only by danger so enveloping and extreme that escape therefrom is preternatural. I saw him suddenly in what had seemed, the instant before, an unmenacing stand of thorn trees. There he loomed, vast, dark, his ears spread, but his trunk down, the most terrifying animate shape known to man, with the possible exception of a charging whale at sea.
His seven tons were poised to obey a signal from his brain. It came, and he rushed forth with an unearthly blast of sound, and the place I had thought safe was a death trap. The brush thickened ahead of me; his charge cut off my retreat. He came from my left while my spear was on the right hand; anyway, I never dreamed of using it in self-defense, my mind denying admission to the useless notion. I began the action of checking and wheeling my horse, knowing well it was too late. He swung the hammer of many hundredweight. I was in easy reach, and there was not even time to tumble off my horse out of his first aim.
But I lived on. It was some seconds before I knew what had saved me—the only thing that could—a thing at once true to life and inordinately strange. Somehow he had mistimed his blow, and it had missed clean. Before he could recoil and strike again, I had completed the turn and was out of his reach. An instant later I was riding full-tilt down the avenue I had just come up, with Tembu Emir in furious pursuit.
Then there was no longer any pattern to the fight, any art or science, and its nightmare likeness grew. In every case that one of us was free to fly, the other was penned in. Sometimes we were both in frantic flight between and around the thickets. You would have thought our horses would go crazy and bring the chase to a quick and bloody end. They stopped, wheeled, turned, dodged, or ran with incredible swiftness. It must be that Mariyah often acted on instinct, and her response to my unconscious signals, such as shiftings of my weight and pressures of my knees and heels, was so complete and swift that she appeared to do my will the same as my own hand. For my part, I had never ridden as well. That much the gods gave, Mariyah and I had become, in a very real sense, a centaur.
In the deeps of my mind the elephant became very Death. I dreamed that when Death comes, he shows vast and dark, sometimes with a terrible hammer that can strike in all directions and, in some eerie fashion, in his victim's image. I dreamed that Death was a mirror in which our own shapes melt away. Death was my great kinsman. He had come with a craglike head and a gaunt body bearing awful scars. But when he had taken other shapes, I had sprung out of his reach. In the blazing sunlight between the thorn I dreamed of escaping him again.
Amid low bush that slowed but did not trap me, Tembu pressed me so closely that his shadow fell across me, but I rode on. Looking back, I saw Simba cross his rear on a bold dash and thrust with his lance, but the point broke off when it had barely pierced the skin. Still it stung the monster, for he turned from my pursuit to chase his tormentor, who more than once had interfered in our affairs. I saw no danger of Tembu catching him, since the course was fairly open, and in the same glance saw my chance to deal a telling blow.
It was my first chance since the battle had moved to the thorn, and to judge from Mariyah's snorting breath and the sweat foam on her sides, I might not have another. She wheeled and darted on a slanting course until we were sixty feet behind my enemy, and about forty on his right. Then we cut in to strike.
Perhaps the drum of Mariyah's hoofs on the sun-baked ground warned him. I was poised to strike and leaning forward when he turned, in the opposite direction from what I might expect, bringing him up parallel to my course. There could be no doubt of his deadly intention—to strike me with his trunk as soon as I came abreast and in his reach.
I had no time or room to veer further to the left and away. I was committed to my stroke, and I gave it the instant his great side became vulnerable, far more forward than the other, slanting toward his vitals, and with the swiftness of Mariyah's run and of my thrusting arm. In the same instant, Mariyah began a wheeling movement to flee Tembu's vengeance, but she was too late. The outstretched trunk made a scythehke, sideways sweep, aimed low enough not to pass over our heads. Its end struck her in the throat a handsbreath under her jutting jaw. I heard heavy bone explode into splinters as she pitched down headfirst.
I went over her head and tumbled and rolled to the edge of the thorn. The shock of the hard fall saved my life in the next few ensuing seconds because I could not obey the fatal instinct to spring up and try to break through the brush, and instead lay still. So Tembu Emir did not see me yet. Screaming, he rushed upon the still quivering horse. I saw what no man could forget as long as his mind lived.
Tembu lifted his foot that was two feet thick and set it down on the mare's chest. With a fourth of his weight he smashed it flat with a horrid sound. Lowering his head, he drove one of his tusks through what remained of her torso, lifted it clear of the ground, then heaved it over and on the other side of the thicket by which I lay. I was reviving now; if Tembu turned his back to me I meant to try to crawl away, trusting to his blasts of rage to hide the sound. Instead he moved to the front of the half-obliterated carcass, which brought him up facing me. Lopping his trunk around the broken neck he pulled it till it stretched to ghastly length; then the head broke off. This he dropped in sudden indifference and fell silent as in deep thought.
That silence let me hear the drum of hooves. Simba was riding hard and close in and around the thorn clumps, trying to provoke Tembu into charging him. But the monster did not look at him and appeared oblivious of his presence. He began to shift his feet and move a little back and forth, the end of his trunk close to the ground.
He showed no anger now, only preoccupation with one train of thought, concentration upon one goal. But as the moments passed without gain, he began to be puzzled, then perplexed, and finally deeply anxious. Was it so? Was my mind wandering? Once he bowed his head in a curious way, then shook it as though to clear it of a mist. Moving slowly, he neared the bush beside which I lay, touched it with the quivering, probing fingers in the orifice of his trunk, then turned his head to sniff the ground about three feet to one side.