16 IN BRIGHTEST AFRICA 
subject of infinite ramifications. I remember, for 
instance, my experience in skinning the first elephant 
that I killed. I shot him in the early afternoon. I 
immediately set to work photographing and measur- 
ing him. ‘That took about an hour, and then I set to 
the serious work of getting off his skin. I worked 
as rapidly as I could, wherever possible using the help 
of the fifty boys of my safari, and by strenuous efforts 
finished taking the skin off and salting it by breakfast 
time the next morning. And that was not quick 
enough. Before I got all the skin off the carcass 
some of it on the under side had begun to decompose — 
and I lost a little of it. This was a particularly 
difficult beast to skin because he had fallen in a little 
hollow and after skinning the exposed side of him all 
the efforts of the fifty black boys to roll him over, out 
of the depression, so that we could easily get at the 
other side, failed. After I had had more practice, I 
was able to photograph, measure, and skin an ele- 
phant and have his hide salted in eight hours. But 
then the work on the skin was only begun. A green 
skin like this weighs a ton and a quarter and in places 
is as much as two and a half inches thick. There is 
about four days’ work in thinning it. I have had 
thirty or forty black boys for days cutting at the in- 
side of the skin in this thinning process or sharpening 
the knives with which they did the work. 
When it is finally thinned down, thoroughly dried 
and salted, it presents another problem. Moisture 
will ruin it. Salt, the only available preservative, 
attracts moisture. It isn’t possible to carry zinc-' 
