THE FALL OF THE ELEPHANT. 215 



They could tell of many a moving battle with wild 

 beasts, many a gallant head of game, and of the 

 death of many a stout oxen and horse, and even 

 perchance of the indefatigable hunters that 

 made of them their home. But the glory and the 

 passionate excitement of elephant hunting is rapidly 

 departing from Southern Africa, never again to 

 return. 



Nothing can better illustrate the rapidity with 

 which the wisest and most powerful of the brute 

 creation is being wiped from the face of Africa, than 

 a survey of his decline and fall within the broad 

 territories contained between the Zambesi and the 

 Indian and South Atlantic Oceans, during the sixty 

 years last past. 



At the beginning of this century the elephant 

 was found plentifully upon the eastern confines, and 

 in the southern forest-belt of the Cape Colony. As 

 lately as 1830 ivory-hunters pursued their calling in 

 the dense bush-veldt of the Eastern province, and 

 still later in Kaffraria ; but the Cape Government, 

 foreseeing the probability of the mighty beast's 

 extinction within a few years, at length proclaimed 

 measures of protection ; and it is a curious fact 

 that there exist at the present moment, within the 

 south-eastern limits of Cape Colony within sight 

 of the Indian Ocean more wild elephants than are 

 to be found for probably 1,500 miles inland. In 

 the Addo Bush, not far from Port Elizabeth ; in the 

 Knysna and Zitzikamma Forests, and upon the 

 jungly slopes of the Winterhoek Mountains, troops 

 of elephants yet wander free and undisturbed, as 

 also does the fierce and gloomy buffalo, and that 

 king of antelopes, the koodoo. Beyond the Kei, in 



