Kraals are usually conducted by the minor prince or chieftain who holds in feudal tenure the villages of the district in which the kraal is held; and it was our privilege to be at the one last mentioned as the guests of Ratemahatmeya Meduanwella, lord of the villages of Panamure and Wellawe, in the province of Sabaramamuwa.
We left Colombo at sunrise in a motor-car (I can never get over that; I am still near enough to my boyhood’s dreaming over the pages of old Sir Samuel Baker not to accept that!) and swept along the muddy Kelani, alive in the early morning with cadjan boats and women bathing. It is a lovely, undulating valley; we saw coolies treading out the grain in the paddy-fields, svelte arecas and talipot-palms smoking with dew, low hills thickly feathered with the dark-green plumage of young rubber-trees, and bevies of brown girls plucking leaves among the sparse tea-bushes. By nine o’clock we had reached the rest-house at Ratnapura, nestled close by Kelani’s sullen lip, and were calling loudly for breakfast. The most striking ornament in the dining-room was a placard advertising American buckwheat cakes, and our roving eye fell upon a two-months’-old copy of the Kansas City “Star,” sure signs of the miracle of mere living in our times. Ratnapura is the capital of the famous gem district, and our host, a wily Cingalese with a prodigious tortoise-shell comb in his back hair, showed us some rough stones—rubies, sapphires, and cats’-eyes—which he had “found,” and would part with as a very special favor.
At noon we left the motor-car and took to the jungle on foot. Our route lay for eight miles along a path cut and burned through the densest jungle specially for this occasion, and toward dusk we came at last, drenched, yet thirsty, through dim, green aisles of tall ebony-and satinwood-trees, to a wide meadow and the dark, swift stream that flows through it along the hem of Panamure. We saw a man far up in a giant palm-tree, clinging to the bole with his naked feet, cutting branches; then a great gaunt beast in the jungle twilight, feeding on the white, succulent trunks of banana-trees; and the pathetic figure of a baby elephant, captured only the week before, tugging hopelessly, but incessantly, at his ankle-ropes, and we knew that we were near the scene of the kraal. We crossed the stream on a bridge half crushed in by ponderous, pachydermous feet, and at once found ourselves among lines of bare brown men squatting under palm-leaf shelters. These were the beaters surrounding the wild herds. The long line of their fires dotted the dusk of the jungle, and the smell of wet wood smoke, flavored with the odors from their cooking-pots, made a kind of wild incense, strangely grateful and reminiscent to our civilized nostrils. At a distance an occasional faint snort, or the soft crackling of undergrowth followed by the thudding of some distant beater’s drum, betrayed the locality where the quarry fed uneasily.
The plan and strategy of an elephant kraal is very simple. A wooded country, over which elephants rove and through which a suitable stream flows, is selected. A stockade from twelve to sixteen feet in height, and inclosing part of the stream and from four to six acres of jungle, is constructed of stout logs lashed together with rattan withes. At one side of the inclosure is a gate, with a V-shaped approach leading to it. When the stockade has been completed, the villagers arm themselves with guns, spears, tom-toms, old pots, horns—anything that will make a noise—and pour into the jungle to beat up the wild herds. They spread out in a circle, sometimes twenty-five miles long, but gradually lessening as the herds are driven nearer the stockade. The main object is to keep the elephants from reaching water except by entering the inclosure, and sometimes this is very difficult. Fires are kept alight at distances of a few feet; and sometimes at night, when the huge beasts charge in a body, the din of drums, bells, shouts, and horns is enough to daunt bolder spirits than the jungle denizens. Frequently a herd succeeds in breaking through and making its escape, occasionally not without a heavy loss to the enemy; but usually after being kept from water for three or four days their terrible thirst drives the poor creatures to the water within the stockade, and the gate closes forever between them and the dear free life of their native jungle.
THE LORD OF THE KRAAL AND HIS HEIR
Panamure is a lovely little village, idling along the banks of its streamlet and cuddled in between two tall and softly wooded peaks as delicately rounded as the breasts of a woman. Its daughters are tender-eyed and domestic, performing the family washing at the front gate, while the men are of mild manner and much given to the business of gentling noosed elephants. They are Buddhists, but their real god is the snowy-bearded old Ratemahatmeya, who is also their father, lord of their lands, and of every grain of rice that goes into their mouths.
We found the old gentleman waiting for us at the “hotel.” He had laid aside the garments of his high estate and put on the long-tailed shirt of the coolie, as being more in keeping with one who had watched five nights in the jungle; but for all that he was a memorable figure, with his small, sharp nose and eyes like those of a sparrow-hawk, his patriarchal beard and imperious voice. Even more distinguished-looking was his brother-in-law, the imperturbable Kalawane. Clad to lead the beaters in nothing but a breech-clout and his shining black beard, he seemed at that moment to have stepped out of the pages of Kipling especially for this occasion.
