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    ‘I won’t bet on that because I’m afraid you’re right’ Hal said, watching little Chief Abu poking the monster with his spear, trying to separate it from the herd. What could this morsel of a man do against this mountain of flesh? It was like a mouse attacking a lion, a squirrel against a grizzly bear. Abu’s head came no higher than the elephant’s knee.
    A mounted specimen of an African elephant on exhibit in the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., measures thirteen feet two inches at the shoulder and when alive weighed twelve tons.

Chapter 8
Buried alive
    Then Hal saw that the little fellow was in trouble.
    The chief had turned to give orders to his men. The elephant saw her chance to squash this bothersome mouse. She wheeled about and prepared to sit down on Abu. Elephants have learned from long experience that no animal or man can take that sort of treatment and come out alive.
    ‘Look out!’ Hal cried, but he did more than shout He leaped forward, knocked Abu out from under the subsiding mountain, and sent him spinning twenty feet away.
    The little man picked himself up, looked around dizzily, trying to figure out what had happened to him.
    Now it was Hal who was in trouble. He had tried to jump clear of the descending bone-crusher and had succeeded - almost Only his left boot was caught under the great rump. He wrenched and strained, but it was no use. Could he undo the laces? Was he going to lose another boot to an elephant?
    But the elephant didn’t want the boot - she wanted the whole man. Before Hal could reach for his laces he felt something like a boa-constrictor go round him and squeeze the breath out of him.
    The monster stood up, whirled Hal into the air and brought him down with a crash on the ground. There was no moss here to ease his fall. The shock was so great that he promptly fainted. He dreamed that one of those elephants of the sky had fallen on him.
    Then the mist cleared from his mind and he realized that he was lying on the ground and the elephant’s trunk was feeling him from head to foot. He opened one eye just enough to see what was going on.
    Nobody was coming to his rescue. The men stood about, hashed, watching. When Roger tried to run forward to help his brother, Abu stopped him.
    Hal understood. The elephant thought he was dead. If anyone rushed in just now, the beast would become excited and really would kill him. Everyone was quiet, and he must remain quiet too.
    It was hard to keep still with that gigantic hand running over his body. It was very much like a hand, because the African elephant has two fingers at the tip of its trunk. These are many times stronger than human fingers, as Hal realized when they pulled at his ear and then his nose and jerked up one of his hands and flung it down again. The beast was plainly trying to make sure that its victim was dead.
    Hal thought for a moment of making a quick move. Perhaps he could suddenly roll out of reach. But he knew better. The elephant is not as clumsy as it looks. That trunk could move like a flash of lightning, or a tusk could go clean through Hal’s body before he had moved an inch. His only chance was to play dead, very dead.
    Everybody and everything was as still as a tomb. He squinted again, just long enough to see that not only the men but the elephants as well were standing stock still, all watching this little act.
    He was lucky - lucky that this was an elephant that stood over him, not a rhino or buffalo. Those beasts don’t stop when they think their victim is dead. They take out their savage rage upon it, plunge their horns into it, stamp on it, grind it into the dust, tear it limb from limb.
    The elephant is not so brutal. It has finer feelings than any other wild animal, finer feelings than any tame animal except perhaps the dog and cat. Some say it has finer feelings than man himself - for no herd of elephants would set out to torture and kill tens of thousands of other beings as man has done more