he hacked at the throttling creepers and clutching thorny branches, saved
him.

Darker and gloomier grew the way. The sides of the _nullah_ closed in until
there was scarcely room for the animals to pass, and then Dermot found
Badshah had entered a natural tunnel in the mountain side. The interior was
as black as midnight, and the soldier had to lie flat on the elephant's
skull to save his own head.

Suddenly a blinding light made him close his eyes, as Badshah burst out of
the darkness of the tunnel into the dazzling glare of the sunshine.

When his rider looked again he found that they were in an almost circular
valley completely ringed in by precipitous walls of rock rising straight
and sheer for a couple of thousand feet. Above these cliffs towered giant
mountain peaks covered with snow and ice.

At the end of the valley farthest from them was a small lake. Near the
mouth of the tunnel the earth was clothed with long grass and flowering
bushes and dotted with low trees. But elsewhere the ground was dazzlingly
white, as though the snow lay deep upon it. Badshah halted among the trees,
and the old elephants passed him and went on in the direction of the lake.
Dermot noticed that they seemed to have suddenly grown feebler and more
decrepit.

He looked down at the white ground. To his surprise he found that from here
to the lake the valley was floored with huge skulls, skeletons, scattered
bones, and tusks. It was the elephants' Golgotha. He had penetrated to a
spot which perhaps no other human being had ever seen--the death-place of
the mammoths, the mysterious retreat to which the elephants of the Terai