It was enormous, unearthly; a survivor perhaps of some ancient species that lived before the Flood, or at least a very giant of its kind.

Its grey-black sides were scarred as though with fighting.

One of its huge tusks, much worn at the end, for evidently it was very old, gleamed white in the moonlight.

The other was broken off about halfway down its length.

When perfect it had been malformed, for it curved downwards and not upwards, also rather out to the right.
There stood this mammoth, this leviathan, this _monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens_, as I remember my old father used to call a certain gigantic and misshapen bull that we had on the Station, flapping a pair of ears that looked like the sides of a Kafir hut, and waving a trunk as big as a weaver's beam--whatever a weaver's beam may be--an appalling and a petrifying sight.
I squatted behind the skeleton of an elephant which happened to be handy and well covered with moss and ferns and watched the beast, fascinated, wishing that I had a large-bore rifle in my hand.