236 MAMMALIA. [Chap. TIL 



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 Sinbad 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 

 was their burial place. 2 It is curious to find this legend 

 of Ceylon in what has, not inaptly, been described as the 

 66 Arabian Odyssey 99 of Sinbad ; the original of which 



1 The selection by animals of a and twenty heads." — Nat Voy. 

 place to die, is not confined to the ch. viii. The same has been re- 

 elephant, Darwin says, that in marked in the Rio G-allegos ; and 

 South America 'Hhe guanacos (11a- at St. Jago in the Cape de Verde 

 mas) appear to have favourite spots Islands* Parwin saw a retired 

 for lying down to die ; on the corner similarly covered with the 

 banks 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 wnent, Lane's edition, vol. iii. p. 



such spot I counted between ten 77. 



