Valley of Death. i8i 



The Singhalese have a further superstition in relation 

 to the close of life in the elephant : they believe that, on 

 feeling the approach of dissolution, he repairs to a solitary 

 valley, and there resigns himself to death. A native 

 who accompanied Mr. Cripps, when hunting, in the 

 forests of Anarajapoora, intimated to him that he was 

 then in the immediate vicinity of the spot "-^ to zvhich 

 the elephmits cojne to die" but that it was so mysteriously 

 concealed, that although every one believed in its exist- 

 ence, no one had ever succeeded in penetrating to it. 

 At the corral which I have described at Kornegalle, in 

 1847, Dehigame, one of the Kandyan chiefs, assured me 

 it was the universal belief of his countrymen, that the 

 elephants, Avhen about to die, resorted to a valley in 

 Safifragam, among the mountains to the east of Adam's 

 Peak, which was reached by a narrow pass with walls 

 of rock on either side, and that there, by the side of a 

 lake of clear water, they took their last repose. ^ It was 

 not without interest that I afterwards recognised this 

 tradition in the story of Sitibad of the Sea, who in his 

 Seventh Voyage, after conveying the presents of Haroun 

 al Raschid to the king of Serendib, is wrecked on his 

 return from Ceylon, and sold as a slave to a master who 

 employs him in shooting elephants for the sake of their 



' The selection by animals of a //ac« with their bones; on one such spot I 



to die, is not confined to the elephant. countedbetween ten and twenty heads." 



Darwin says, that in South America — Nat. Voy. ch. viii. The same has 



"theguanacos (llamas) appear to have been remarked in the Rio Gallegos ; 



favourite spots for lying down to die ; and at St. Jago in the Cape de Verde 



on the banks of the Santa Cruz river, Islands, Darwin saw a retired corner 



in certain circumscribed .spaces which similarly covered with the bones of the 



were generally bushy and all near the goat, as if it were "the burial-ground 



water, the ground was actually white of all the goats in the island.'' 



