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Félix was with him, and Adams, who was heading the column, could hear the shouts of the Zappo Zap. The men with their loads went at a quick walk, sometimes breaking into a trot, urged forward by the gun-butt of Félix. The heat was sweltering, but there was no rest.
Over a hundred square yards lay blistering beneath the sun, red and blue and black; and the torment of it pierced the silence like a shout, though not a movement was there, save the movement of the bald-headed vulture as he waddled, or the flapping of a rag of skin to the breeze. They seized on the tent, the Zappo Zap laughing and with teeth glinting in the sun.
Away to the east the burst elephant gun was resting just where it had been dropped; the bones of the giraffe, clean-picked and white, were lying just where the gun had laid them; and the bones of the man who had held the gun were lying just where the leopards had left him. Adams knew nothing of this triangle drawn by death; he still fancied the Zappo Zap alive and deadly.
There was not even a bird in the air; yet close to them an elephant was trumpeting shrilly and fiercely as elephants trumpet when they charge. Again came the sound, and once again, but this time it broke lamentably to a complaint that died away to silence. Instantly the Zappo Zap came to himself. He knew that sound. An elephant was dying somewhere near by, caught in a trap possibly.
He told of how in the night, listening by the camp fire, he had heard the mysterious boom of its coming, and of the marvellous sight he had watched when Berselius, failing in his attempt to waken the Zappo Zap, had fronted the oncoming army of destruction. Schaunard's eyes lit up as he listened. "Ah," said he, "that is a man!" The remark brought Adams to a halt.
To my mind, if there is such a chap as that Zap what do they call him, the pirate it is much more likely that he is on board that felucca, or perhaps he was one of the fellows who came on board us, than that an Austrian man-of-war brig should have sent her cruising about to give notice of him to English merchantmen."
He was very much alive and doing, and his deeds and his fate are worth a word, for they formed a tragedy well fitting the stage of this merciless land. The Zappo Zap, having secured the gun and its ammunition, revelling in the joy of possession and power, went skipping on his road, which lay to the northeast.
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