One second now was worth an eternity.
Then suddenly a distant murmur swelled through the strange silence. Daleham
looked out over the barricade.
"They're--No. What is it? What are they doing?"
All round the circle of besiegers there was an eerie hush. No voice was
heard. All--the Rajah, the flag-bearer, Brahmins, soldiers, coolies--had
turned their faces away from the bungalow and were staring into the
distance. And as the few survivors of the garrison looked up over the
barricade an incredible sight met their eyes.
From the far-off forest, bursting out at every point of the long-stretching
wall of dark undergrowth that hemmed in the wide estate, wild elephants
appeared. Over the furrowed acres they streamed in endless lines, trampling
down the ordered stretch of green bushes. In scores, in hundreds, they
came, silently, slowly; the great heads nodding to the rhythm of their
gait, the trunks swinging, the ragged ears flapping, as they advanced.
Converging as they came, they drew together in a solid mass that blotted
out the ground, a mass sombre-hued, dark, relieved only by flashes of
gleaming white. For on either side of every massive skull jutted out the
sharp-pointed, curving ivory. Of all save one.
For the mammoth that led them, the splendid beast that captained the
oncoming array of Titans under the ponderous strokes of whose feet the
ground trembled, had one tusk, one only.
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