THE TAMING OF THE WILD 279 



membered, is the cost of keeping" an elephant in 

 a menagerie any clue to what it would cost 

 in the jungle. The elephant can carry half a 

 ton for hours at a stretch, and over short 

 distances it can carry three times that burden. 

 Its speed may not be great, but its endurance 

 is remarkable. There are swampy tracts in 

 the heart of Africa, which we are gradually 

 reclaiming, and here, in spite of its tremendous 

 weight, its caution and surefootedness would 

 give it the advantage over many draught 

 animals of lighter build. Not only, like the 

 horse and camel, can it pull or carry, but, 

 unlike any other animal, it can also push logs 

 or other weights with its powerful forehead, 

 being able, it is said (though on the authority 

 of what test I have never been able to discover) 

 to push far more than it can pull. Its trunk, 

 moreover, is an organ at once so strong and 

 so delicate as is unequalled elsewhere in the 

 animal world. Writers of other days used to 

 describe the elephant as exclusively a dweller 

 in the plains. In the absence of further 

 evidence, it did not occur to them to associate 

 so huge a beast with the power of climbing the 

 sides of mountains, but we now know that 

 elephants ascend to a considerable height up the 

 slopes of Kenia and Kilimanjaro, and this sug- 

 gests that the animal may be used for mountain 

 transport where mules are not available for 



