Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 15, 2025
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.
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.
Now the Zappo Zap, when he had fled from Adams, put ten miles of country behind him, going almost with the swiftness of an antelope, taking low bush and broken ground in his stride, and halting only when instinct brought him to a stand, saying, "You are safe."
He was dropping it from his fingers when a cry from behind him made him turn his head. A dark figure was approaching in the moonlight. It was the Zappo Zap. The man whom Berselius, with splendid heroism, had tried to save. Like the looking-glass, and protected, perhaps, by some god of his own, the columns of destruction had passed him by.
The Zappo Zap had gone apart from the camp to sleep. He had drugged himself by smoking hemp, and he was lying half a hundred yards away, face down on the ground, dead to everything in earth and heaven. Berselius had spied him. What Adams saw then was, perhaps, the most heroic act ever recorded of man.
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.
Félix was a very big man, almost as big as Adams: a member of the great cannibal fighting tribe of Zappo Zaps, he had followed Verhaeren, who had once held a post in the Bena Pianga country, to Yandjali; he had a sort of attachment for Verhaeren, which showed that he possessed some sort of heart.
God-man or devil-man, or a combination of both, but great, incontestably great and compelling. Adams knelt down beside the body, and the Zappo Zap stood by with incurious eyes looking on. Berselius was not dead. He was breathing; breathing deeply and stertorously, as men breathe in apoplexy or after sunstroke or ruinous injury to the brain.
Three mornings ago Berselius, who rarely dreamt, had awakened from a long night of hunting in Dreamland. In Dreamland he had cast off his new personality and became his old self, and then, in his hunting shirt and with a cordite rifle in his hand, accompanied by the Zappo Zap, he had tracked elephant herds across illimitable plains.
In the early days it was a very necessary entrenchment for the Belgians, as a tribe almost as warlike as the Zappo Zaps terrorized the districts; but the people of this tribe have long been brought under the blue flag with the white star. They are now "soldiers," and their savagery, like a keen tool, has been turned to good account by the Government.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking