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This is quite a common thing for a rhino to do. They have the worst tempers in the jungle, and they would just as soon charge a mountain if they didn't like the look of it. Muztagh had awakened the great creature from his sleep, and he came bearing down like a tank over "no man's land." Muztagh met him squarely, with the full shock of his tusks, and the battle ended promptly.
The next instant the scrub parted right and left, the points of two enormous tusks protruded from the swaying tangle of leaves and creepers, and in the drawing of a breath the head and fore quarters of the biggest bull elephant I had ever seen came into view.
The elephant of Ceylon is considered by most naturalists as a distinct race, but by some as a distinct species, and here "not one in a hundred is found with tusks, the few that possess them being exclusively males." Sir J. Emerson Tennent, 'Ceylon, 1859, vol. ii. p. 274.
With his great bullet head and prick ears, his beetling brows and deep sunken eyes, his ferocious mouth and protruding tusks, his short thick neck and massive shoulders, his large, gawky, and misshapen trunk, coated with dingy brown fur, shading into dirty yellow on the stomach, his stout, bandy legs armed with curving talons, and his huge leathern wings hanging in loose folds about him, he looked more like an imp of Satan than a dragon.
The hunters hoped that this was the prelude to his sleep, and watched him with intense earnestness. It proved to be so. As they sat gazing, they noticed that his head sunk a little, his ears ceased their flapping, his tail hung motionless, and his trunk, now twined around his tusks, remained at rest. They gaze intently.
He blew an alarm-call, when up sprang a hundred torches. The band of Germans dashed at the barricade as at the tusks of a boar. They were picked men, most of them officers, but a scanty number in the thick of an armed populace. Wilfrid saw the lighted passage into the great house, and thither, throwing out his arms, he bore the affrighted group of ladies, as a careful shepherd might do.
A long, long time ago a widow lived with her young son and daughter in a small hut. They had a hard time to get enough to eat. But the boy was anxious to do all he could, and while he was still quite small he made a bow and arrows of walrus tusks which he found under the snow. With these weapons he shot birds for their food.
Elephants, or tusks, walking on foot are never absent;" but though we were eager for flesh, we could not give him credit, and went down the defile which gives rise to the Sandili River: where we crossed it in the defile, it was a mere rill, having large trees along its banks, yet it is said to go to the Loangwa of Zumbo, N.W. or N.N.W. We were now in fact upon the slope which inclines to that river, and made a rapid descent in altitude.
And immediately seizing and binding us, they carried us before King Amavaroo, who, seated on the leopard's skin which served him for a throne, was looking as gloomy and morose as his followers. "Then men came with the tusks they had received from us, one man following another with his purchases, and in every tusk the black spots and patches of decay were beginning to appear.
Confident that the animal could not keep its feet till morning, after the rough handling it had received, they resolved upon staying till it fell, and securing its fine tusks. Two or three hours passed, and still the rain kept falling, though not quite so heavily as at first. "I don't like this sort of thing," said Hendrik.
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