Norris hitched forward and reloaded the rifle.  Then he advanced slowly between the bushes on the alert for a charge from the wounded bull; but nothing stirred.  No sound came to his ears except the soft padding noise of his horse’s hoofs upon the turf.  There was not a crackle of the brushwood, and the trees seemed carved out of metal.  He rode through absolute silence in a suspension of all movement.  Once his horse trod upon a bough, and the snapping of the twigs sounded like so many cracks of a pistol.  At first the silence struck Norris as merely curious, a little later as very lonesome.  Once or twice he stopped his horse with a sudden jerk of the reins, and sat crouched forwards with his neck outstretched, listening.  Once or twice he cast a quick, furtive glance over his shoulder to make certain that no one stood between himself and the entrance to the hollow.  He forgot the buffalo; he caught himself labouring his breath, and found it necessary to elaborately explain the circumstance in his thoughts on the ground of heat.

The next moment he began to plead this heat not merely as an excuse for his uneasiness, but as a reason for returning to camp.  The heat was intense, he argued.  Above him the light of an African midday sun poured out of a brassy sky into a sort of inverted funnel, and lay in blinding pools upon the scattered slabs of rock.  Within the hollow, every cup of the innumerable flowers which tapestried the cliffs seemed a mouth breathing heat.  He became possessed with a parching thirst, and he felt his tongue heavy and fibrous like a dried fig.  There was, however, one obstacle which prevented him from acting upon his impulse, and that obstacle was his sense of shame.  It was not so much that he thought it cowardly to give up the chase and quietly return, but he knew that the second after he had given way, he would be galloping madly towards the entrance in no child’s panic of terror.  He finally compromised matters by dropping the reins upon his horse’s neck in the unformulated hope that the animal would turn of its own accord; but the horse kept straight on.

As Norris drew towards the innermost wall of granite, there was a quick rustle all across its face as though the screen of shrubs and flowers had been fluttered by a draught of wind.  Norris drew himself erect with a distinct appearance of relief, loosened the clench of his fingers upon his rifle, and began once more to search the bushes for the buffalo.

For a moment his attention was arrested by a queer object lying upon the ground to his left.  It was in shape something like a melon, but bigger, and it seemed to be plastered over with a black mould.  Norris rode by it, turned a corner, and then with a gasp reined back his horse upon its haunches.  Straight in front of him a broken rifle lay across the path.

Norris stood still, and stared at it stupidly.  Some vague recollection floated elusively through his brain.  He tried to grasp and fix it clearly in his mind.  It was a recollection of something which had happened a long while ago, in England, when he was at school.  Suddenly, he remembered.  It was not something which had happened, but something he had read under the great elm trees in the close.  It was that passage in Robinson Crusoe which tells of the naked footprint in the sand.