ELEPHANT HUNTING 
237 
bamboos than the bulls. A spell of wet weather, such as 
we had fortunately been having, drives them down in the 
dense forest which covers the lower slopes. Here they 
may either pass all their time, or at night they may go still 
further down, into the open valley where the shambas lie; 
or they may occasionally still do what they habitually did 
in the days before the white hunters came, and wander far 
away, making migrations that are sometimes seasonal, and 
sometimes irregular and unaccountable. 
No other animal, not the lion himself, is so constant a 
theme of talk, and a subject of such unflagging interest 
round the camp-fires of African hunters and in the native 
villages of the African wilderness, as the elephant. Indeed 
the elephant has always profoundly impressed the imagina¬ 
tion of mankind. It is, not only to hunters, but to natural¬ 
ists, and to all people who possess any curiosity about 
wild creatures and the wild life of nature, the most in¬ 
teresting of all animals. Its huge bulk, its singular form, 
the value of its ivory, its great intelligence—in which it is 
only matched, if at all, by the highest apes, and possibly by 
one or two of the highest carnivores—and its varied habits, 
all combine to give it an interest such as attaches to no 
other living creature below the rank of man. In line of 
descent and in physical formation it stands by itself, 
wholly apart from all the other great land beasts, and 
differing from them even more widely than they differ 
from one another. The two existing species—the African, 
which is the larger and finer animal, and the Asiatic— 
differ from one another as much as they do from the 
mammoth and similar extinct forms which were the con¬ 
temporaries of early man in Europe and North America. 
