On the eastern side of the lake was a great open space where nothing seemed to grow and all about this space were the skeletons of hundreds of dead elephants.
There they lay, some of them almost covered with grey mosses hanging to their bones, through which their yellow tusks projected as though they had been dead for centuries; others with the rotting hide still on them.
I knew that I was looking on a cemetery of elephants, the place where these great beasts went to die, as I have since been told the extinct moas did in New Zealand.

All my life as a hunter had I heard rumours of these cemeteries, but never before did I see such a spot even in a dream.
See! There was one dying now, a huge gaunt bull that looked as though it were several hundred years old.

It stood there swaying to and fro.

Then it lifted its trunk, I suppose to trumpet, though of course I could hear nothing, and slowly sank upon its knees and so remained in the last relaxation of death.
Almost in the centre of this cemetery was a little mound of water-washed rock that had endured when the rest of the stony plain was denuded in past epochs.

Suddenly upon that rock appeared the shape of the most gigantic elephant that ever I beheld in all my long experience.