For About Two Hours We Travelled Upon The Circuitous Tracks Of The Elephants To No Purpose, When We Suddenly Were Startled By The Shrill Trumpet Of One Of These Animals In The Thick Thorns, A Few Hundred Yards To Our Left.

The ground was so intensely hard and dry that it was impossible to distinguish the new tracks from the old, which crossed and recrossed in all directions.

I therefore decided to walk carefully along the outskirts of the jungle, trusting to find their place of entrance by the fresh broken boughs. In about an hour we had thus examined two or three miles, without discovering a clue to their recent path, when we turned round a clump of bushes, and suddenly came in view of two grand elephants, standing at the edge of the dense thorns; having our wind, they vanished instantly into the the jungle. We could not follow them, as their course was down wind; we therefore made a circuit to leeward for about a mile, and, finding that the elephants had not crossed in that direction, we felt sure that we must come upon them with the wind in our favour should they still be within the thorny jungle; this was certain, as it was their favourite retreat.

With the greatest labour I led the way, creeping frequently upon my hands and knees to avoid the hooks of the kittar bush, and occasionally listening for a sound. At length, after upwards of an hour passed in this slow and fatiguing advance, I distinctly heard the flap of an elephant's ear, shortly followed by the deep guttural sigh of one of those animals, within a few paces, but so dense was the screen of jungle that I could see nothing.

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