There was no time to gain my feet and escape; indeed I did not wish to do so, who felt that there are some failures which can only be absolved by death.

I just knelt there, waiting for the end.
In an instant the giant creature was almost over me.

I remember looking up at it and thinking in a queer sort of a way--perhaps it was some ancestral memory--that I was a little ape-like child about to be slain by a primordial elephant, thrice as big as any that now inhabit the earth.

Then something appeared to happen which I only repeat to show how at such moments absurd and impossible things seem real to us.
The reader may remember the strange dream which Hans had related to me that morning.
One incident of this phantasy was that he had met the spirit of the Zulu lady Mameena, whom I knew in bygone years, and that she bade him tell me she would be with me in the battle and that I was to look for her when death drew near to me and "Jana thundered on," for then perchance I should see her.
Well, no doubt in some lightning flash of thought the memory of these words occurred to me at this juncture, with the ridiculous result that my subjective intelligence, if that is the right term, actually created the scene which they described.

As clearly, or perhaps more clearly than ever I saw anything else in my life, I appeared to behold the beautiful Mameena in her fur cloak and her blue beads, standing between Jana and myself with her arms folded upon her breast and looking exactly as she did in the tremendous moment of her death before King Panda.