It seemed to him that he had scarcely lost consciousness when he was awakened by a touch on his face.  It was still dark; but, when he sprang up hastily, he could vaguely make out Badshah standing beside him.  The elephant touched him with his trunk and then sank down on his knees.  The invitation to mount was unmistakable; and Dermot slung his rifle on his back and climbed on to the elephant’s neck.  Badshah rose up and moved off, and apparently the other elephants followed him, for the noises that had filled the forest and showed them to be awake and feeding, ceased abruptly.  Dermot could just faintly distinguish the soft footfall of the animal immediately behind him.

When Badshah reached the lowest hills and left the heavy forest behind the sky became visible, filled with the clear and vivid tropic starlight.  An animal track led up between giant clumps of bamboos, by long-leaved plantain trees and through thick undergrowth of high, tangled bushes that clothed the foothills.  Up this path, as a paling in the east betokened the dawn, the long line of elephants climbed in the same order of march as on the previous day.  Badshah led; and behind him followed the oldest elephants, on which the steep ascent told heavily.

Two thousand feet above the forest the track led close to a Bhuttia village.  As the rising sun streaked the sky with rose, the head of the long line neared the scattered bamboo huts perched on piles on the steep slopes.  The track was not visible from the village, but a party of wood-cutters from the hamlet had just reached it on their way to descend to their day’s work in the jungle below.  They saw the winding file of ascending elephants some distance beneath them and in great alarm climbed up a big rubber tree growing close to the path.  Hidden among its broad and glossy green leaves they watched the approaching elephants.

From their elevated perch they had a good view of the serpentining line.  To their amazement they saw that a white man sat astride the neck of the first animal and was apparently conducting the enormous herd.  One of the wood-cutters recognised Dermot, who had once visited this very village and interrogated this man among others.  Petrified with fright, the Bhuttia and his companions watched the long line go by, and for fully an hour after the last elephant had disappeared they did not venture to descend from the tree.

When at last they did so there was no longer any thought of work.  Instead, they fled hotfoot to the village to spread their strange news; and next day, when they went to their work below and explained to the enraged Gurkha overseer the reason of their absence on the previous day, they told him the full tale.  No story is too incredible for the average native of India, and the overseer and various forest guards who also heard the narrative fully believed it and spread it through the jungle villages.  It grew as it passed from tongue to tongue, until the story finally rivalled the most marvellous of the exploits of Krishna, that wonderful Hindu god.