AN ANXIOUS TIME. 103 



bank of the river, consisting of a horse-shoe-shaped piece of ground sur- 

 rounded by a trench. The trench was about five hundred yards round, and 

 the entrance to the enclosed space was by the ford. The elephants would 

 enter by the heel of the shoe, as it were, and would have to go some two 

 hundred yards before they came to the farthest point, the boundary 

 trench. The trench was eight feet wide at top, six at bottom, and eight 

 feet deep (this I subsequently found was a greater section than is necessary 

 to confine wild elephants), and in a few days it was finished, except where 

 rock was met and had to be blasted. There were eight hundred men at 

 work, whose wages were about threepence each per diem. They removed 

 about one cubic yard per man per diem. 



It was nearly a month before all was in readiness, as the removal of the 

 rock was laborious work. The personal labour I spent on that enclosure, 

 severe though it was, was not greater than the anxiety I had to endure. 

 Some Job's comforters suggested that if one elephant fell into the trench 

 the others would make a bridge of him and hie them back to the hills ; 

 others, that the gate which I had devised for closing the entrance, and which 

 was hauled up on a single rope, to be cut away in the joyful moment when 

 the stern of the last elephant cleared it, would be carried away like chaff 

 before the wind by their backward rush ! whilst a few did not hesitate to say 

 that no elephants would approach a place bearing traces of new earth-work 

 and the recent presence of so many work-people. I lived under canvas at 

 Morlay, three miles distant, as the jungle was too unhealthy to admit of my 

 camping at the work, and I frequently got drenched by the heavy Septem- 

 ber rains, winch was not conducive to either comfort or health. I remained 

 at the kheddah daily till late in the evening, and then rode to camp as fast 

 as my pony could carry me, unattended, though there was the notorious 

 man-eating tigress of Iyenpoor afoot, and many others of her race which I 

 stood a chance of falling in with. They would not in all probability have 

 interfered with me, but still it was exciting to my pony, who quite under- 

 stood jungle-life, if not to myself. I was determined to make the scheme 

 succeed if possible, not only from my love of adventure, and the necessity 

 for executing what I had suggested to Government and undertaken to carry 

 out, but from the desire to prove to several officials who considered the 

 scheme to be the vision of a lunatic, that their croakings were rather the 

 utterances of Bedlamites. Pleasantries appeared in the Bangalore papers 

 regarding the probable effect the kheddah operations would have on the 

 price of salt, which it was represented was being laid in by me in large 

 quantities for application to the caudal appendages of any elephants I hap- 

 pened to meet with ! 



