So we went on, keeping close together. To me, as
I was the only one with a rifle, was accorded what I did not at all
appreciate, the honour of heading the procession.
Another half-mile and again we heard that strange rolling sound which
was produced, I believe, by the great brute beating upon its breast,
but noted that it was not so continuous as on the previous night.
"Ha!" said Hans, "he can only strike his drum with one stick now. Your
bullet broke the other, Baas."
A little farther and the god roared quite close, so loudly that the
air seemed to tremble.
"The drum is all right, whatever may have happened to the sticks," I
said.
A hundred yards or so more and the catastrophe occurred. We had
reached a spot in the forest where one of the great trees had fallen
down, letting in a little light. I can see it to this hour. There lay
the enormous tree, its bark covered with grey mosses and clumps of a
giant species of maidenhair fern. On our side of it was the open space
which may have measured forty feet across, where the light fell in a
perpendicular ray, as it does through the smoke-hole of a hut.
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