UKIGIN OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO. 139 



Every ivory billiard ball in use in the world is said to have cost 

 the life of a human being. And still the demand for ivory, not only 

 for the manufacture of these simple spheres for a popular game, 

 but for a multitude of other uses in decorative and toilet articles, 

 continues, with the price so high that the trade still goes on in spite 

 of its disastrous cost in human life. 



Most of the heavy expense has been paid in the jungles of 

 Central Africa, where a man does not count for half as much as a 

 humped ox or a trained ape. For nature has built an effectual bar- 

 rier about her cultivators of billiard balls — the elephants — and he 

 who would penetrate it must take his life in his hands. 



In the first place she has provided an atmosphere of great heat, 

 reeking half the year with moisture, in which lurk the germs of a 

 hundred unnamed diseases, and rent for two seasons with sudden 

 storms accompanied by heavy rains. Then there is the barrier of 

 a rank and tangled vegetation, through which no roads but those 

 of the jungle-folk have yet pierced. 



IVORY, HOW OBTAINED AND USED. 



The huge trees conceal fierce wild animals, poisonous snakes, 

 and insects whose stings mean death at the end of the days of suffer- 

 ing. Impassable morasses, lakes, broad rivers and mountain ranges 

 are also numerous, and yet more dangerous are the jealous savages, 

 who have learned enough of civilization to distrust it, and who 

 know that a man never protests against robbery after he is dead. 



So the elephant is given a chance to grow a little before the 

 harvesters of the ivory crop can reach him. When he has trump- 

 eted for a few score of years, and his tusks have made him a power 

 in the herd, some native hunter spies him as he thrashes through 

 the jungle or wades in a morass. 



Then a great number of the harvest warriors gather and build 

 a huge inclosure of vines, into which the elephant one day walks. 

 From the surrounding trees come a shower of arrows, and perhaps 

 a bullet or two from an ancient gun obtained at a hundred times 

 its value from some w^andering trader. 



The elephant charges about trumpeting, but on every side the 



