‘With pleasure,’ I answered, eager to see more wonders.
A handsome carriage and pair soon drove up to the door. We stepped in and were driven away. Carl Hagenbeck now told me of his great scheme. He had bought a large property at Stellingen, and here, in two years’ time, he hoped to amalgamate his whole collection in one vast park. On one huge square plot of ground would be the stables for the elephants and the dens for the carnivorous animals, with the training cages in the centre. The whole of the rest of the land would be devoted to buffaloes, zebras, antelopes, deer, ibex, etc.
‘There will be no cages there,’ he said; ‘there will be no bars and no netting. You will stand here and look over a vast plain covered with animals of every description, all apparently in the same enclosure. But they will be separated by wide ditches, so ingeniously hidden by rockwork that it will appear to the eye as if all the animals were in the park together.’ Hagenbeck grew quite animated during the description of his vast plans. ‘In two years I shall spend on this property £20,000. And you know,’ he added, ‘in Germany you can do with £20,000 what you could not do with £40,000 in England, labour and materials being so much cheaper. But we have arrived, so let us get out and have a look at the place, such as it is at present.’
In one large pen there were no less than 102 flamingoes. Such a sight I had never witnessed since I saw the hosts in the lagoons in Egypt. There were some 60 cranes and storks, 100 water-fowl, 50 swans, and 50 various birds. There were 50 deer of various sorts, 18 antelopes, 22 buffaloes, yaks, and zebus, 3 zebras, 2 camels and a dromedary, 8 llamas and guanacos, and some Shetland ponies. There were three sorts of water-buffalo from the Caucasus, Siam, and Egypt.
There was a female white deer, presented to Hagenbeck by the German Emperor. There were some of the rare Dobowsky’s deer, found only in the possession of the Duke of Bedford. There was a pair of brindled gnus, taken in exchange from Dr. Sclater. There were Caucasian deer, axis deer, Sambur deer, and wapiti deer. There was an enormous dromedary from Russian Turkestan, the largest species of its race. There were Siberian roe-deer with enormous horns as big as our red deer’s. There was an Alcal sheep from Russian Turkestan, and two sorts of ibex (one very tall) from Central Siberia. These animals, Hagenbeck says, will be found to be new to science, also one from the Pamir district, price £100! Hundreds of packing-cases, from one which held a rabbit to another which carried an elephant and her baby, filled a whole field. In the surrounding fields grazed llamas, yaks, and camels, where one would expect to find domestic sheep and cows.
‘And here, I suppose, in two years’ time we shall see half a dozen okapi grazing?’ I suggested.
At last I had beaten Hagenbeck, for he shook his head, and answered:
‘They are hard to get—very hard to get!’
After partaking of coffee in the house, I shook Carl Hagenbeck by the hand, and thanked him for his kindness in showing me the most wonderful collection of animals in the world.
To give some idea of the prices asked and obtained for animals, I take the following from Carl Hagenbeck’s catalogue: