Although grown jackals may be fairly easily brought over to Europe, we had great difficulty with members of the more noble feline race, and above all with the King of Beasts himself. I learnt by experience that lynxes and wild cats were only to be tamed with great difficulty, and I once lost a captive lynx very suddenly in spite of every care.
These things are not so simple. This is why it is not yet possible to bring many of the most charming and most interesting members of the African animal world to Europe. I much wish that it were possible to bring full-grown lions over. I would far rather see one or two of them in all their native wildness and majesty than a whole troop of home-reared and almost domesticated specimens.
But the hours I devoted to my own attempts in this direction were not spent in vain. They were memorable hours, full of splendid excitement.
A FEW SPECIMENS OF ELEPHANT-TUSKS SECURED BY THE EMISSARIES OF DEUSS & CO., IN PORTUGUESE EAST AFRICA. XII
A Dying Race of Giants
Every one who knows Equatorial East Africa will bear me out in saying that it is easier nowadays to kill fifty rhinoceroses than a single bull-elephant carrying tusks weighing upwards of a couple of hundred pounds.
There are only a few survivors left of this world-old race of giants. Many species, probably, have disappeared without leaving a single trace behind. The block granite sarcophagi on the Field of the Dead in Sakkarah in Egypt, dating from 3,500 years ago, are memorials (each weighing some 64 tons) of the sacred bulls of Apis: the mightiest monument ever raised by man to beast. Bulls were sacred to Ptah, the God of Memphis, and their gravestones—which Mariette, for instance, brought to light in 1851—yield striking evidence of the pomp attached to the cult of animals in those days of old.
But no monument has been raised to the African elephants that have been slaughtered by millions in the last hundred years. Save for some of the huge tusks for which they were killed, there will be scarcely a trace of them in the days to come, when their Indian cousins—the sacred white elephants—may perhaps still be revered.
John Hanning Speke, who with his fellow-countryman Grant discovered the Victoria Nyanza, found elephant herds grazing quite peacefully on its banks. The animals, nowadays so wild, hardly took any notice when some of their number were killed or wounded: they merely passed a little farther on and returned to their grazing.