There was no turning them now.  None but the very farthest on the flank could have turned, given sense enough left to do it.  It was a flood of maddened monsters, crazed with fear, pent by their own numbers, forced forward by the crowd behind, that invited me to dam them if I could!  As they burst into the open, more shots rang out in the forest to lend their fury wings!

I glanced behind, to right and left, but there was no escape, I had come too far into the open to retreat!  There were big rocks to the rear to have scrambled on, but there was no time.  There was one big rock in front of me that divided their course about in halves; to pass it they must open up, although they would almost surely close again.  I took my stand in line with that, as a man on trial for life takes refuge behind an unestablishable alibi.

They talk glibly about men’s whole lives passing in review before them in the instant of a crisis.  That may be.  That was a crisis, and I saw elephants—­elephants!  I remembered some of what Courtney had told us—­some of the mad yarns Coutlass spun when liquor and the camp-fire made him boastful.  All the advice I ever heard; all my previous imaginings of what I should do when such a time came, seemed to be condensed into one concrete demand—­shoot, shoot, shoot, and keep on shooting!  Yet my finger, bent around the trigger, absolutely would not act!

The oncoming gray wave of brutes split apart at the rock, as it must do, some of them screaming as they crashed into it breast on and were crushed by the crowd behind.  In the van of the right-hand wing, brushing the rock with his shoulder, charged an enormous bull with tusks so large that the heavier had weighed down his head to a permanent rakish angle.  He caught sight of me—­trumpeted like a siren in the Channel fog—­and came at me with raised ears and trunk outstretched.  I heard shooting to the left, and more shots from the forest, where the very active ghost or madman was keeping up a battle of his own.  I felt the fear, that turns a man’s very heart to ice, grip hold of me—­felt as if nothing mattered—­imagined the whole universe a sea of charging elephants—­accepted the inevitable—­and suddenly received my manhood back again!  My forefinger acted!  I fired point-blank down the throat of the charging bull.  And it seemed to have no more effect on him than a pea-shooter has on a railroad train!

I had left Schillingschen’s heavy-bored elephant gun behind with Brown, considering it too cumbersome, and was using a Mauser with flat-nosed bullets.  I fired four shots as fast as I could pump them from the magazine straight down the monster’s hot red throat; and he continued to come on as if I had not touched him, hard-pressed on either flank by bulls nearly as big as he.

Perhaps the reason why my past history did not flash review was that my time was not yet come!  I continued to see elephant—­nothing but elephant!—­little bloodshot eyes aflame with frenzy—­great tusks upthrown—­a trunk upraised to brain me—­huge flat feet that raged to tread me down and knead me into purple mud!  I kept the last shot with a coolness I believe was really numbness—­then felt his hot breath like a blast on my face, and let him have it, straight down the throat again!