Those Brutes Who Said We
Should All Die Here If We Stayed, And Yet Dared Not Face The
Danger With Us, Should We Now Give Them A Helping Hand?
Never!
We told them we would share our fate with Bana, and share it we
will, for God rules everything: every man must die when his time
comes."
We marched for the first time without music, as the drum is never
allowed to be beaten in Unyoro except when the necessities of war
demand it, or for a dance. Wanyamuezi and Wanyoro, in addition
to our own twenty men, carried the luggage, though no one carried
more than the smallest article he could find. It was a pattern
Unyoro march, of only two hours' duration. On arrival at the end
we heard that elephants had been seen close by. Grant and I then
prepared our guns, and found a herd of about a hundred feeding on
a plain of long grass, dotted here and there by small mounds
crowned with shrub. The animals appeared to be all females, much
smaller than the Indian breed; yet though ten were fired at, none
were killed, and only one made an attempt to charge. I was with
the little twin Manua at the time, when, stealing along under
cover of the high grass, I got close to the batch and fired at
the larges, which sent her round roaring. The whole of them
then, greatly alarmed, packed together and began sniffing the air
with their uplifted trunks, till, ascertaining by the smell of
the powder that their enemy was in front of them, they rolled up
their trunks and came close to the spot where I was lying under a
mound. My scent then striking across them, they pulled up short,
lifted their heads high, and looked down sideways on us. This
was a bad job. I could not get a proper front shot at the boss
of any of them, and if I had waited an instant we should both
have been picked up or trodden to death; so I let fly at their
temples, and instead of killing, sent the whole of them rushing
away at a much faster pace than they came. After this I gave up,
because I never could separate the ones I had wounded from the
rest, and thought it cruel to go on damaging more. Thinking over
it afterwards, I came to the conclusion I ought to have put in
more powder; for I had, owing to their inferior size to the
Indian ones, rather despised them, and fired at them with the
same charge and in the same manner as I always did at rhinoceros.
Though puzzled at the strange sound of the rifle, the elephants
seldom ran far, packed in herd, and began to graze again. Frij,
who was always ready at spinning a yarn, told us with much
gravity that two of my men, Uledi and Wadi Hamadi, deserters,
were possessed of devils (Phepo) at Zanzibar.
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