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.

See!  There was one dying now, a huge gaunt bull that looked as though it were several hundred years old.  It stood there swaying to and fro.  Then it lifted its trunk, I suppose to trumpet, though of course I could hear nothing, and slowly sank upon its knees and so remained in the last relaxation of death.

Almost in the centre of this cemetery was a little mound of water-washed rock that had endured when the rest of the stony plain was denuded in past epochs.  Suddenly upon that rock appeared the shape of the most gigantic elephant that ever I beheld in all my long experience.  It had one enormous tusk, but the other was deformed and broken off short.  Its sides were scarred as though with fighting and its eyes shone red and wickedly.  Held in its trunk was the body of a woman whose hair hung down upon one side and whose feet hung down upon the other.  Clasped in her arms was a child that seemed to be still living.

The rogue, as a brute of this sort is called, for evidently such it was, dropped the corpse to the ground and stood a while, flapping its ears.  Then it felt for and picked up the child with its trunk, swung it to and fro and finally tossed it high into the air, hurling it far away.  After this it walked to the elephant that I had just seen die, and charged the carcass, knocking it over.  Then having lifted its trunk as though to trumpet in triumph, it shambled off towards the forest and vanished.

The curtain of mist fell again and in it, dimly, I thought I saw—­well, never mind who or what I saw.  Then I awoke.

“Well, did you see anything?” asked a chorus of voices.

I told them what I had seen, leaving out the last part.

“I say, old fellow,” said Scroope, “you must have been pretty clever to get all that in, for your eyes weren’t shut for more than ten seconds.”

“Then I wonder what you would say if I repeated everything,” I answered, for I still felt dreamy and not quite myself.