14 BEASTS AND MEN 
serious mishap. Our arrival at that port caused great 
excitement among the townsfolk. And small wonder! No 
such collection of wild beasts had ever before been seen in 
Europe. The united caravans of Cassanova and Migoletti 
included, apart from the smaller creatures, five elephants, 
fourteen giraffes, four Nubian buffaloes, a rhinoceros, twelve 
antelopes and gazelles, two wart-hogs, four aard-varks, and no 
fewer than sixty carnivores. Among the latter there were 
seven young lions, eight panthers and cheetahs, thirty 
hyzenas, and many smaller representatives of the cat tribe. 
There were also twenty-six ostriches, of which sixteen were 
full-grown birds. One of these, a female, was the largest 
specimen I have ever seen. This hen could easily reach a 
cabbage which I placed eleven feet from the ground. 
Pretty nearly the whole population of Trieste must have 
turned out to watch us unload. And whenever an elephant or 
a giraffe came sprawling across in the crane a roar of delight 
would go up from the multitude on shore. It was truly 
marvellous that we ever reached the railway station without 
an accident, for the crowd in the streets was enormous, and 
we had the greatest possible difficulty in making our way 
through. We travelled to Hamburg wa Vienna, Dresden 
and Berlin, and as some of our possessions found new homes 
in the Zoological Gardens in each of those cities, our numbers 
were greatly reduced by the time we finally arrived at our 
destination. This, as I have said, was the largest collection 
of the African fauna that I have ever received. It had been 
preceded, however, by several other successful expeditions 
(under the command of Cassanova and others) to the same 
region, and in a later chapter I shall describe the methods 
adopted for capturing the animals, and the difficulties which 
the expeditions had to overcome during the arduous marches 
out of the interior of Nubia. 
At this time I was doing a roaring trade in African wild 
beasts, and splendid prices were paid for my wares, especially 
for elephants. I recollect one occasion when I sold three 
young elephants to an American animal dealer for the sum 
