ELEPHANT HUNTING 283 



may either pass all their time, or at night they may go still 

 further down, into the open valley where the shambas lie; 

 or they may occasionally still do what they habitually did 

 in the days before the white hunters came, and wander far 

 away, making 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 unflagging 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 imagi- 

 nation of mankind. It is, not only to hunters, but to natu- 

 ralists, and to all people who possess any curiosity about 

 wild creatures and the wild life of nature, the most in- 

 teresting 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 

 mammoth and similar extinct forms which were the con- 

 temporaries of early man in Europe and North America. 

 The carvings of our palaeolithic 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 

 the tepid waters of the Nile and the Congo. 



In the first dawn of history, the sculptured records of 

 the kings of Egypt, Babylon, and Nineveh show the immense 



