Just while it was in the midst of its performance, keeping its water-battery in full play, and apparently with malicious enjoyment, it was seen all at once to desist; and then its huge body commenced rocking from side to side, one shoulder now upheaving, then the other, while the long trunk was swept in circles through the air, at the same time emitting, instead of water, shrill sounds that proclaimed either pain or terror.

What could it mean? The quadruped was evidently smitten with some sudden fear; but who and what was the enemy it dreaded? So mentally inquired Karl and Caspar; but before either had time to shape his thought into an interrogative speech, the shikaree had answered it.

“He-ho!” he exclaimed. “Goot! vair goot!—praise to the God of the Great Gangee! See, sahibs, the rogue he go down, down—he sinkee in de quicksand that near swalley Ossaroo; he-ho; sinkee! he sinkee!”

Karl and Caspar easily comprehended the meaning of Ossaroo’s broken but exultant speeches. Bending their eyes on the brute below, and watching its movements, they at once perceived that the shikaree had spoken the truth. The elephant was evidently sinking in the quicksand!

They had noticed that when it first entered the bed of the stream, the water had not reached far above its knees. Now it was up to its sides, and slowly but gradually rising higher. Its violent struggles, moreover—the partial and alternate raising of its shoulders, its excited shrieks—and the proboscis, rapidly extended now to this side, now to that, as if searching to grasp some support—all proved the truth of Ossaroo’s assertion—the rogue was sinking in the quicksand. And rapidly was the creature going down. Before the spectators had been watching it five minutes, the water lapped up nearly to the level of its back, and then inch by inch, and foot by foot, it rose higher, until the round shoulders were submerged, and only the head and its long trumpet-like extension appeared above the surface.

Soon the shoulders ceased to play; and the vast body exhibited no other motion, save that gentle descent by which it was being drawn down into the bowels of the earth!

The trunk still kept up its vibratory movement, now violently beating the water into foam, and now feebly oscillating, all the while breathing forth its accents of agony.

At length the upturned head and smooth protuberant jaws sank beneath the surface; and only the proboscis appeared, standing erect out of the water like a gigantic Bologna sausage. It had ceased to give out the shrill trumpet scream; but a loud breathing could still be heard, interrupted at intervals by a gurgling sound.

Karl and Caspar kept their seats upon the tree, looking down upon the strange scene with feelings of awe depicted in their faces. Not so the shikaree, who was no longer aloft. As soon as he had seen the elephant fairly locked in the deadly embrace of that quicksand that had so nearly engulfed his own precious person, he lowered himself nimbly down from the branches.

For some moments he stood upon the bank, watching the futile efforts which the animal was making to free itself, all the while talking to it, and taunting it with spiteful speeches—for Ossaroo had been particularly indignant at the loss of his skirt. When at length the last twelve inches of the elephant’s trunk was all that remained above the surface, the shikaree could hold back no longer. Drawing his long knife, he rushed out into the water; and, with one clean cut, severed the muscular mass from its supporting stem, as a sickle would have levelled some soft succulent weed.

The parte............