What Added Materially To The Annoyance Of Losing The Spare Guns Was The
Thoughtless Character Of The Advance.
I felt sure that these fellows
would outrun the position of the elephants, which, if they had continued
in a direct route, should have entered the jungle within 300 yards of
our first station.
We had slipped, and plunged, and struggled over this distance, when we
suddenly were checked in our advance. We had entered a small plot of
deep mud and rank grass, surrounded upon all sides by dense rattan
jungle. This stuff is one woven mass of hooked thorns: long tendrils,
armed in the same manner, although not thicker than a whip-cord, wind
themselves round the parent canes and form a jungle which even elephants
dislike to enter. To man, these jungles are perfectly impervious.
Half-way to our knees in mud, we stood in this small open space of about
thirty feet by twenty. Around us was an opaque screen of impenetrable
jungle; the lake lay about fifty yards upon our left, behind the thick
rattan. The gun-bearers were gone ahead somewhere, and were far in
advance. We were at a stand-still. Leaning upon my long rifle, I stood
within four feet of the wall of jungle which divided us from the lake. I
said to B., 'The trackers are all wrong, and have gone too far. I am
convinced that the elephants must have entered somewhere near this
place.'
Little did I think that at that very moment they were within a few feet
of us.
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