A U. S. Department of Agriculture report calls the tomato “the prodigy of the vegetable world.” Its present success is due in large part to the discovery of vitamins. Although used as a food for little more than a century it now is almost as widely distributed as wheat, a food plant which has been cultivated for at least 5,000 years.
Today the tomato crop covers about a half million acres in the U. S. alone. This crop consists of more than 20,000,000 bushels of fresh tomatoes and more than 300,000 tons of canned products. There are now about 150 known varieties, adapted to all sorts of purposes.
The Holiest Place on Earth
The summit of Adam’s Peak in south-central Ceylon, wrapped perpetually in priestly robes of grey clouds, is one of the holy places of the earth. There, through many centuries, the prayers of millions belonging to warring creeds have worn thin the curtain between the effable and the ineffable. It is a shrine of four of the world’s great religions. In the rock is a depression that looks like a giant’s footprint. Hindus believe it was made by snake-haired Siva, the destroyer. Moslems say it is the footprint of the first man, Adam, who was exiled to this mountaintop after he was thrown out of Paradise. Buddhists believe that it could have been made only by the great Gautama. Nestorian Christians maintain that it is a relic of the disciple Thomas, who brought the gospel of Christ into the East. To this spot, braving the road through leech-infested forests below and the perilous ascent along gale-swept ledges, have come generation after generation of devout pilgrims to voice a common prayer in different tongues through different intermediaries.
The pilgrim, standing by the footprint of Adam, looks down upon the forest-covered hills to the eastward. Over all the land spreads the grey shadow of the supernatural. Below him is one of the most imposing spectacles on earth—the middle slopes scarlet with the blossoms of dense forests of gigantic rhododendrons, the deep-blue patches of mountain lakes, and canyons which no human has entered—their mysterious depths hidden by wind-tossed fog. Great waterfalls roar over vine-covered cliffs. Strange sounds arise from jungles of white-stemmed palms. It is a wild land of ghosts and demons watched over by the holy mountains.
In this unearthly country native legend from ancient days has placed, most appropriately, the death valley of the elephants. There, in a pleasant hollow beside a lake of clear water—reached only by a narrow pass with high walled precipices on either side—these animals make their way from all over the island when they feel the chill drowsiness of approaching death. It has been an interminable procession of the doomed since time began. To the stricken old elephant, the coming of death brings an irresistible nostalgia which draws his faltering feet homeward to this mist-shrouded valley piled high with the white bones of his ancestors. It is his haven of rest from the weariness and disillusion of living.
The belief has deep roots in the ancient folk-lore of Ceylon. It has spread all over the East. It is embodied in the Arabian Nights. No man ever has entered this vale of death since Sinbad the Sailor, who was carried there in the trunk of a huge elephant after he had been knocked senseless when the tree in which he was hiding was uprooted by a herd of the animals. Sinbad at last found himself in this valley piled high with bones and knew that he was in the long-sought death place of the elephants.
Another Ceylon elephant cemetery is concealed in a dense forest near the ancient sacred city of Anardhupara. It is so well hidden that no man knows its exact location, although all know that it exists. Unless there are such cemeteries, the natives ask, what becomes of the remains of dead elephants?
The death of the jungle elephant remains a fantastic mystery. No very serious efforts have been made to provide a solution. Remains of these creatures that have died natural deaths seldom have been found, either in Asia or Africa. Yet obviously the great beasts are mortal, subject to various fatal ailments and to the inevitable decay of age. Evidently when one of them feels death approaching it retires to a place of the dead where it quietly breathes its last and adds its bones to those of the vast multitudes of its race that have gone before it into the unknown.
The belief is so strong that there has been a persistent search for these elephant Golgothas for the past century. Such a discovery, especially in Africa, probably would mean inestimable wealth in ivory. But, except for one or two questionable instances cited below, nobody ever has found such a place. Natives sometimes claim to know an approximate location from tradition, although they never have seen it.