236 MAMMALIA, (Car. VII. 
ence, no one had ever succeeded in penetrating to it. 
At the corral which I have described at Kornegalle, in 
1847, Dehigame, one of the Kandyan chiefs, assured me 
it was the universal belief of his countrymen, that the 
elephants, when about to die, resorted to a valley in 
Saffragam, among the mountains to the east of Adam’s 
Peak, which was reached by a narrow pass with walls 
of rock on either side, and that there, by the side of a 
lake of clear water, they took their last repose.! It was 
not without interest that I afterwards recognised this 
tradition in the story of Sinbad of the Sea, who in his 
Seventh Voyage, after conveying the presents of Haroun 
al Raschid to the king of Serendib, is wrecked on his re- 
turn from Ceylon, and sold as a slave to a master who 
employs him in shooting elephants for the sake of their 
ivory; till one day the tree on which he was stationed 
having been uprooted by one of the herd, he fell sense- 
less to the ground, and the great elephant approaching 
wound his trunk around him and carried him away, 
ceasing not to proceed, until he had taken him to a place 
where, his terror having subsided, he found himself 
amongst the bones of elephants, and knew that this 
was their burial place. Itis curious to find this legend 
of Ceylon in what has, not inaptly, been described as the 
* Arabian Odyssey” of Sinbad; the original of which 
‘1 The selection by animals of a 
place to die, is not confined to the 
elephant. Darwm says, that in 
South America “the guanacos (lla- 
mas) appear to have favourite spots 
for lying down to die; on the 
banks of the Santa Cruz river, in 
certain circumscribed spaces which 
were generally bushy and all near 
the water, the ground was actually 
white with their bones; on one 
such spot I counted between ten 
and twenty heads.”— Nat. Voy. 
ch, vii, The same has been re- 
marked in the Rio Gallegos; and 
at St, Jago in the Cape de Verde 
Islands, Darwin saw a retired 
corner similarly covered with the 
bones of the goat, as if it were “the 
burial-ground of all the goats in the 
island.” ; 
2 Arabian Nights’ Entertain- 
ment, Lann’s edition, vol. iil. p. 
7 
