From Veldt Camp Fires

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H. A. Bryden. From Veldt Camp Fires

Chapter One. A Secret of the Orange River

Chapter Two. The Story of a Tusk

Chapter Three. Jan Prinsloo’s Kloof

Chapter Four. The Bushman’s Fortune

Chapter Five. The Conquest of Christina De Klerk

Chapter Six. A Christmas in the Veldt

Chapter Seven. Their Last Trek

Chapter Eight. The Luck of Tobias De La Rey

Chapter Nine. The Mahalapsi Diamond

Chapter Ten. A Tragedy of the Veldt

Chapter Eleven. Queen’s Service

Chapter Twelve. A Transvaal Morning

Chapter Thirteen. The Mystery of Hartebeest Fontein

Chapter Fourteen. Charlie Thirlmere’s Lion

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It was a fine spring morning in the City: even in the great dingy warehouse, where Cecil Kensley was engaged in cataloguing a vast store of ivory in preparation for the periodical sales, the sun beamed pleasantly. It lit up the dark corners of the building, and played everywhere upon hundreds of smooth, rounded elephants’ teeth, varying in colour from a rich creamy yellow to darkest brown – from the gleaming tusk, fresh chopped within the last year from the head of a young bull, to the huge, dark, discoloured, almost black-skinned tooth, that for a hundred years had lain unnoticed in some mud swamp, or for generations had decorated the grave or kraal-fence of some native chief. There they lay, those precious pillars of ivory – solid scrivelloes, Egyptian soft teeth, Ambriz hard irregulars, billiard and bagatelle scrivelloes, bangle teeth, Siam, Niger, Abyssinian, Bombay, West Coast, Cape, and all the rest of them – upon which the world sets so great a store, and for which mankind is so rapidly exterminating a species.

Those wonderful teeth, dumb memorials, so many of them, of dark tales of blood and suffering, of slave raids, plundered villages, murders, floggings, terrible journeys to the coast, unutterable scenes of horror and woe – what histories could they not unfold? But the tusks lay there, hugging their grim secrets, silent and mute enough.

.....

“I see what thou requirest, O great one,” cries Mosusa. “Thy blood too must flow, and at my hands!”

Suddenly he raises his spear, plunges it into the creature’s trunk, and as suddenly withdraws it. The beast screams with pain, the blood gushes forth from the spear-thrust, and in a moment, with a blow of the wounded member, the elephant has beaten the old native to the ground. In the next moment the re-infuriated beast kneels quickly upon Mosusa and crushes the life from his frame, as it had crushed the white man’s. The two bodies lie there together, misshapen, mangled, yet still warm. And now the elephant, having completed his work, turns slowly away and plunges into the jungle.

.....