Poor Little Jali, My Plucky And Active Ally, Lay, As I
Thought, Dead Upon The Litter.
We laid him gently upon my
angarep, which I had raised by four men, so that we could lower
him gradually from the kneeling camel, and we carried him to the
camp, about thirty yards distant.
He was faint, and I poured some
essence of peppermint (the only spirit I possessed) down his
throat, which quickly revived him. His thigh was broken about
eight inches above the knee, but fortunately it was a simple
fracture.
Abou Do now explained the cause of the accident. While the party
of camel-men and others were engaged in cutting up the dead
elephants, the three aggageers had found the track of a bull that
had escaped wounded. In that country, where there was no drop of
water upon the east bank of the Settite for a distance of sixty
or seventy miles to the river Gash, an elephant if wounded was
afraid to trust itself to the interior; one of our escaped
elephants had therefore returned to the thick jungle, and was
tracked by the aggageers to a position within two or three
hundred yards of the dead elephants. As there were no guns, two
of the aggageers, utterly reckless of consequences, resolved to
ride through the narrow passages formed by the large game, and to
take their chance with the elephant, sword in hand. Jali, as
usual, was the first to lead, and upon his little grey mare he
advanced with the greatest difficulty through the entangled
thorns, broken by the passage of heavy game; to the right and
left of the passage it was impossible to move.
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