236 
MAMMALIA. 
[Chap. VII. 
ence, no one had ever succeeded in penetrating to it. 
At the corral which I have described at Kornegalle, in 
1 847, 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. 1 It was 
not without interest that I afterwards recognised this 
tradition in the story of Siribad of the Sea, who in his 
Seventh Voyage, after conveying the presents of Haroun 
al Easchid 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 
tvas their burial place. 2 It is curious to find this legend 
of Ceylon in what has, not inaptly, been described as the 
i( Arabian Odyssey " of Sinbad ; the original of which 
r 1 The selection by animals of a and twenty heads." — Nat. Voy. 
flace to die, is not confined to the ch. viii. The same has been re- 
elephant. Darwin says, that in marked in the Eio Grallegos ; and 
South America "the gnanacos (11a- at St, Jago in the Cape de Verde 
mas) appear to have favourite spots Islands, Darwin saw a retired 
for lying down to die ; on the corner similarly eovered with the 
hanks of the Santa Cruz river, in bones of the goat, as if it were ''the 
certain circumscribed spaces which burial-ground of all the goats in the 
were generally bushy and all near island." 
the water, the ground was actually 2 Arabian Nights' Entertain- 
white with their bones ; on one ment. Lane's edition, vol. iii. p. 
such spot I counted between ten 77. 
