Then curiosity and perhaps the fear of being laughed at overcame me. I
took the bowl and held it under my nose, while Harût threw over my head
the antimacassar which he had used in the mango trick, to keep in the
fumes I suppose.

At first these fumes were unpleasant, but just as I was about to drop
the bowl they seemed to become agreeable and to penetrate to the inmost
recesses of my being. The general affect of them was not unlike that of
the laughing gas which dentists give, with this difference, that whereas
the gas produces insensibility, these fumes seemed to set the mind
on fire and to burn away all limitations of time and distance. Things
shifted before me. It was as though I were no longer in that room but
travelling with inconceivable rapidity.

Suddenly I appeared to stop before a curtain of mist. The mist rolled
up in front of me and I saw a wild and wonderful scene. There lay a lake
surrounded by dense African forest. The sky above was still red with the
last lights of sunset and in it floated the full moon. On the eastern
side of the lake was a great open space where nothing seemed to grow and
all about this space were the skeletons of hundreds of dead elephants.
There they lay, some of them almost covered with grey mosses hanging to
their bones, through which their yellow tusks projected as though they
had been dead for centuries; others with the rotting hide still on them.
I knew that I was looking on a cemetery of elephants, the place where
these great beasts went to die, as I have since been told the extinct
moas did in New Zealand. All my life as a hunter had I heard rumours
of these cemeteries, but never before did I see such a spot even in a
dream.