He remembered his days in the elephant lines.  These brown creatures had been his masters then.  They had cut his grass for him in the jungle, and brought him bundles of sugar-cane.  The hill people say that the elephant memory is the greatest single marvel in the jungle, and it was that memory that saved Khusru then.  It wasn’t deliberate gratitude for the grass-cutting of long ago.  It wasn’t any particular emotion that he could reach out his trunk and touch.  It was simply an impulse—­another one of the thousand mysteries that envelop, like a cloud, the mental processes of these largest of forest creatures.

These were the days when he lived apart from the herd.  He did it from choice.  He liked the silence, the solitary mud-baths, the constant watchfulness against danger.

One day a rhino charged him—­without warning or reason.  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.  Muztagh’s tusk, driven by five tons of might behind it, would have pierced a ship’s side, and the rhino limped away to let his hurt grow well and meditate revenge.  Thereafter for a full year, he looked carefully out of his bleary, drunken eyes and chose a smaller objective before he charged.

Month after month Muztagh wended alone through the elephant trails, and now and then rooted up great trees just to try his strength.  Sometimes he went silently, and sometimes like an avalanche.  He swam alone in the deep holes, and sometimes shut his eyes and stood on the bottom, just keeping the end of his trunk out of the water.  One day he was obliged to kneel on the broad back of an alligator who tried to bite off his foot.  He drove the long body down into the muddy bottom, and no living creature, except possibly the catfish that burrow in the mud, ever saw it again.

He loved the rains that flashed through the jungles, the swift-climbing dawns in the east, the strange, tense, breathless nights.  And at midnight he loved to trumpet to the herd on some far-away hill, and hear, fainter than the death-cry of a beetle, its answer come back to him.  At twenty-five he had reached full maturity; and no more magnificent specimen of the elephant could be found in all of British India.  At last he had begun to learn his strength.

Of course he had known for years his mastery over the inanimate things of the world.  He knew how easy it was to tear a tree from its roots, to jerk a great tree-limb from its socket.  He knew that under most conditions he had nothing to fear from the great tigers, although a fight with a tiger is a painful thing and well to avoid.  But he did not know that he had developed a craft and skill that would avail him in battle against the greatest of his own kind.  He made the discovery one sunlit day beside the Manipur River.