In Wildest Africa ^ 



in the valley echoed the beautiful, resonant, melancholy 

 cry of the great grey shrike ; cock and hen birds answered 

 one another in such fashion that the call seemed to come 

 from only one bird. There was no other living thing to 

 see or hear. 



But now ! At last ! I shall never forget how suddenly 

 in one of the brilliant bursts of sunshine the mighty white 

 tusks of two bull-elephants shone out in the hollow so 

 dazzlingly white that one must have beheld them to under- 

 stand their extraordinary effect, seen thus against that 

 impressive background. Close by was a bull-giraffe. 

 Vividly standing out from the landscape, they would have 

 baffled any artist trying to put them on the canvas. I 

 understood then why A. H. Neumann, one of the most 

 skilful English elephant-hunters, so often remarked on the 

 overwhelming impression he received from these snow- 

 white, shining elephant-tusks. So white do they come 

 out in the photographs that the prints look as though they 

 had been touched up. But these astonishing pictures are 

 as free from any such tampering as are all the rest of my 

 studies of animal life.^ 



Before I succeeded in getting my first picture of the 



elephants and giraffes consorting together, I was much 



tempted to kill the two huge bull-elephants. They came 



so often close to the foot of my hill that I had plenty of 



opportunities of killing them without over-much danger to 



^ The raison d'etre of these powerful weapons of the African elephant 

 is a difficult question. Why did the extinct mammoth carry such very 

 different tusks, curving upwards? Why has the Indian elephant such 

 small tusks, and the Ceylon elephant hardly any at all, whilst the African's 

 are so huge and heavy ? 



