CHAPTER V: THE DEATH-PLACE

An hour or two after night had fallen on the jungle Badshah stopped suddenly and sank down on his knees. Dermot took this as an invitation to dismount, and slid to the ground. When Badshah stopped, the long-stretching line behind him halted, too, and the elephants broke their formation and wandered about feeding. Soon the forest resounded with the noise of creepers being torn down, branches broken off, and small trees uprooted so that the hungry animals could reach the leafy crowns. Dermot realised that in the darkness he was in danger of being trodden underfoot among the hundreds of huge animals straying about. But Badshah knew it, too, and so he remained standing over his man, while the latter sat down on the ground, rested his aching back against a tree, and made a meal from the contents of his haversack. Badshah contented himself with the grass and leaves that he could reach without stirring from the spot, and then cautiously lowered himself to the ground and stretched his huge limbs out.

Dermot lay down beside him, as he had so often done before in the nights spent in the jungle. But, exhausted as he was, he could not sleep at first. The strangeness of the adventure kept him awake. To find his presence accepted by this vast gathering of wild elephants, animals which are usually extremely shy of human beings, was in itself extraordinary. Much as he knew of the jungle he had never dreamt of this. In Central Indian villages he had been told legends of lost children being adopted by wolves. But for elephants to admit a man into their herd was beyond belief. That it was due to Badshah’s affection for him was little less remarkable than the fact itself. For it opened up the question of the animal’s extraordinary power over his kind. And that was an unfathomable mystery.

Dermot found the riddle too difficult to solve. He ceased to puzzle over it. The noises in the forest gradually died down, and the intense silence that followed was broken only by the harsh call of the barking-deer or the wailing cry of the giant owl. Fatigue overcame him, and he slept.

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.

Meanwhile Dermot and his mammoth companions were climbing steadily higher and ever higher into the mountains. A panther, disturbed by them in his sleep beside the bones of a goat, rose growling from the ground and slunk sullenly away. A pair of brilliantly-plumaged hornbills flew overhead with a loud and measured beat of wings. Kalej pheasants scuttled away among the bushes.

But soon the jungle diminished to low scrub and finally fell away behind the ascending elephants, and they entered a region of rugged, barren mountains cloven by giant chasms and seamed by rocky nullahs down which brawling streams rushed or tumbled over falls. A herd of gooral—the little wild goat—rushed away before their coming and sprang in dizzy leaps down almost sheer precipices.

As the mountains closed in upon him in a narrow passage between beetling cliffs thousands of feet high, Dermot’s interest quickened. For he knew that he was nearing the border-line between India and Bhutan; and this was apparently a pass from one country into the other, unknown and unmarked in the existing maps, one of which he carried in his haversack. He took it out and examined it. There was no doubt of it; he had made a fresh discovery.

He turned round on Badshah’s neck and looked down on all India spread out beneath him. East and west along the foot of the mountains the sea of foliage of the Terai swept away out of sight. Here and there lighter patches of colour showed where tea-gardens dotted the darker forest. Thirty odd miles to the south of the foothills the jungle ended abruptly, and beyond its ragged fringe lay the flat and fertile fields of Eastern Bengal. A dark spot seen indistinctly through the hot-weather haze marked where the little city of Cooch Behar lay. Sixty miles and more away to the south-east the Garo Hills rose beyond the snaky line of the Brahmaputra River wandering through the plains of Assam.

A sharp turn in the narrow defile shut out the view of everything except the sheer walls of rock that seemed almost to meet high overhead and hide the sky. Even at noon the pass was dark and gloomy. But it came abruptly to an end, and as through a gateway the leading elephants emerged suddenly on a narrow jungle-like valley. The first line of mountains guarding Bhutan had been traversed. Beyond the valley lay another range, its southern face covered with trees.

Badshah halted, and the elephants behind him scattered as they came out of the defile. The aged animals among them, as soon as they had drunk from a little river running midway between the mountain chains and fed by streams from both, lay down to rest, too exhausted to eat. But the others spread out in the trees to graze.

Dermot, who had begun to fear that the supply of food in his haversack might run short, found a plantain tree and gathered a quantity of the fruit. After a frugal meal he wrote up his notes on the pass through which he had just come and made rough military sketches of it. Then he strolled among the elephants grazing near Badshah. They showed no fear or hostility as he passed, and some of the calves evinced a certain amount of curiosity in him. He even succeeded in making friends with one little animal about a year old, marked with whitish blotches on its forehead and trunk, which allowed him to touch it and, after due consideration, accepted the gift of a peeled banana. Its mother stood by during the proceeding and regarded the fraternising with her calf dubiously.

Not until dawn on the following day did the herd resume its onward movement. Dermot was awake even before Badshah’s trunk touched his face to arouse him, and as soon as he was mounted the march began again. The route lay through the new mountain range; and all day, except for a couple of hours’ halt at noon, the long line wound up a confusing jumble of ravines and passes. When night fell a plateau covered with tall deodar trees had been reached, and here the elephants rested.

Daybreak on the third morning found Badshah leading the line through a still more bewildering maze of narrow defiles and a forest with such dense foliage that, when the sun was high in the heavens, its rays scarcely lightened the gloom between the tree-trunks. Dermot wondered how Badshah found his way, for there was no sign of a track, but the elephant moved on steadily and with an air of assured purpose.

At one place he plunged into a deep narrow ravine filled with tangled undergrowth that constantly threatened to tear Dermot from his seat. Indeed, only the continual employment of the latter’s kukri, with which 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.