"But in escaping from Scylla I had run into the jaws of Charybdis. I
heard the elephant fall, and glanced round. Straight in front of me,
and not fifteen paces away, were the other two bulls. They were staring
about, and at that moment they caught sight of me. Then they came, the
pair of them--came like thunderbolts, and from different angles. I had
only time to snap my rifle to, lift it, and fire, almost at haphazard,
at the head of the nearest, the unwounded bull.

"Now, as you know, in the case of the African elephant, whose skull is
convex, and not concave like that of the Indian, this is always a most
risky and very frequently a perfectly useless shot. The bullet loses
itself in the masses of bone, that is all. But there is one little vital
place, and should the bullet happen to strike there, it will follow
the channel of the nostrils--at least I suppose it is that of the
nostrils--and reach the brain. And this was what happened in the present
case--the ball struck the fatal spot in the region of the eye and
travelled to the brain. Down came the great bull all of a heap, and
rolled on to his side as dead as a stone. I swung round at that instant
to face the third, the monster bull with one tusk that I had wounded
two days before. He was already almost over me, and in the dim moonlight
seemed to tower above me like a house. I lifted the rifle and pulled
at his neck. It would not go off! Then, in a flash, as it were, I
remembered that it was on the half-cock. The lock of this barrel was a
little weak, and a few days before, in firing at a cow eland, the
left barrel had jarred off at the shock of the discharge of the right,
knocking me backwards with the recoil; so after that I had kept it on
the half-cock till I actually wanted to fire it.

"I gave one desperate bound to the right, and, my lame leg