Zoologists naturally frown upon the idea because of its very weirdness. They explain that the remains of very few tropical animals ever are found and that the elephant, for all its bulk, need be considered no great exception. Vultures, jackals, hyenas and other carrion eaters soon would tear the flesh from the bones. Insects would bear away the fragments they left. Jungle vegetation rapidly would cover and hide the naked skeleton.
Some credence is given to the native belief by Lieut. Col. Gordon Casserly of the British army. A persistent elephant hunter during years of service in India, he never came upon the carcass or bones of one of these animals which had met a natural death. “The idea of a vast death place of these modern mammoths hidden in the remote recesses of the Himalayas,” he states, “did not seem a far-fetched one to me when I lived in the shadow of those mighty mountains and heard at night the great elephant troops pass by the little outpost that I commanded on the frontier of Bhutan, as they clamber up towards the snow-clad peaks from the forest below.”
The British elephant hunter W. D. M. Bell once thought he had found one of East Africa’s elephant cemeteries in the country north of Lake Rudolph. He had followed an elephant path to a grassy plateau strewn with skulls and other elephant bones, some partially buried. None of the remains, however, were recent. Bell tasted the green water of a nearby pool and found it bitter with natron. The indications were that large numbers of elephants had been driven to this pool to drink during a time of drought and had been poisoned by the water.
Maj. P. H. G. Powell-Cotton tells of finding another spot strewn with bones in the same general region which might answer the specification for an “elephant graveyard.” “Here I was surprised,” he reported, “to find the whole countryside scattered with remains, the fitful sun lighting up glistening bones in every direction. In all my journeyings through elephant country I do not think I have ever come across before a skeleton of one of these beasts for whose death the guides could not account. My guide called this place ‘The-place-where-the-elephants-come-to-die’ and assured me that when the elephants fell sick they would come deliberately for long distances to lay their bones in this spot. I had heard of these cemeteries from Swahili traders who told me they had occasionally found more ivory than they could carry. The place was well known to the Turkana, who regularly visited it to carry off the tusks.”
The Vanishing Golden Carpet
The rarest plant in North America, found only four times by botanists, is a ground-hugging desert flower—the gold carpet. The plant appears, on rare occasions, in California’s Death Valley. Its appearance is that of a rosette of yellow leaves, sometimes as much as ten inches in diameter, lying flat on the ground. From this rosette arise innumerable tiny golden yellow blossoms, so that the whole seems like a patch of golden carpet in the brown desert. The reason for its rare occurrence is that its seeds can germinate only after a good rain. Such rains are rare in its habitat.
The plants must spring up within a few days. Ordinarily, even then, they die with the increasing drought before blossoming—thus forming no seeds. In order for them to produce the seeds for another generation there must be another rain following shortly upon the first.
The seeds become buried in the desert soil and, in the course of evolution, have developed the capacity of suspended animation over a number of years. In the old days, it is probable, these seeds retained their fertility only for a single season. Now there may be several years between rains sufficient to spur them to germination, and even longer periods between double rains which will enable them to form seeds.
The strange little plant first was discovered in 1891. There were only two specimens and search failed to reveal any more. Two years later, however, at about the same place another single plant was reported. No others were revealed by an intensive search through the entire area.
In 1931 and 1932 Dr. Frederick V. Coville of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and French Gilman, a California botanist, again made an intensive search but could not find a single plant. They came to the erroneous conclusion that the plant might be native to the mountains, from which occasional seeds were washed down after heavy rains. A few years later Mr. Gilman again took up the search and succeeded in locating the plant in four places. He found 14 individuals altogether and watched their growth carefully. Only three became large enough to flower and produce seed. The others dried up and died when they had only a few leaves and no branches. Later, however, Gilman found many specimens of the gold carpet scattered over low hills in the neighborhood.