234 ELEPHANT-HUNTING [ch. x 



migrations that are sometimes seasonal, and sometimes 

 irregular and unaccountable. 



No other animal, not the lion himself, is so constant 

 a theme of talk, and a subject of such unfiagging interest 

 round the camp-fires of African hunters and in the 

 native villages of the African wilderness, as the elephant. 

 Indeed, the elephant has always profoundly impressed 

 the imagination of mankind. It is, not only to hunters, 

 but to naturalists, and to all people who possess any 

 curiosity about wild creatures and the wild life of 

 nature, the most interesting of all animals. Its huge 

 bulk, its singular form, the value of its ivory, its great 

 intelligence — in which it is only matched, if at all, by 

 the highest apes, and possibly by one or two of the 

 highest carnivores — and its varied habits, all combine to 

 give it an interest such as attaches to no other living 

 creature below the rank of man. In line of descent and 

 in physical formation it stands by itself, wholly apart 

 from all the other great land beasts, and differing from 

 them even more widely than they differ from one 

 another. The two existing species — the African, which 

 is the larger and finer animal, and the Asiatic — differ 

 from one another as much as they do from the mam- 

 moth and similar extinct forms which were the contem- 

 poraries of early man in Europe and North America. 

 The carvings of our paktolithic forefathers, etched on 

 bone by cavern-dwellers, from whom we are sundered 

 by ages which stretch into an immemorial past, show 

 that in their lives the hairy elephant of the North played 

 the same part that his remote collateral descendant now 

 plays in the lives of the savages who dwell under a 

 vertical sun beside tlie tepid waters of the Nile and the 

 Congo. 



In the first dawn of history, the scidptured records of 



