Part 6

Colonel Julius Barras (“India and Tiger-Hunting”) entered con amore into a study of the elephant, so far as its character came into play when the animal was employed in sport; and he did what no other gentleman, to the author’s knowledge, has ever done; namely, turned mahout himself, and drove shikar tuskers against many a tiger. His appreciation of this creature’s courage, benevolence, and reliability is very much in accord with that which has been expressed; but he offers some observations upon vice that should not be overlooked. “One peculiarity of elephants,” remarks the Colonel, “is that, when desirous of killing any one, they nearly always select as a victim their own or a rival’s attendant.” It seems rather strained, however, to speak of this fact as a “peculiarity,” since circumstances would naturally bring about such a selection.

But no provocation need be offered to an elephant in order that he should desire to kill a man. “Sahib,” said Mohammed Yakoob, the driver of an immense old tusker, whom Colonel Barras had drawn from the government stables at Baroda, “you see that this elephant is a beast void of religion (be imān), and he hates the English.”

“Dear me,” answered the Colonel, “and how does he get on with the natives?”

“Oh!” replied the mahout, “much better, but still he is uncertain even with them. He has killed two, and there is but little doubt that he will do for me, his keeper, sooner or later.”

Colonel Barras knew that Futteh Ali, the elephant in question, had never seen him before, and was well aware that it was impossible for this creature to feel offended at any act of his. The colonel’s mind was also full of conventional ideas concerning elephants, so he disbelieved what the driver told him, and resolved to make friends with Futteh Ali, and ride him after tigers. He tells what happened in the following words:--

“One afternoon I considered myself fortunate in arriving before Futteh Ali when no one was in sight. I drew up in front of him with a few pieces of chopped sugar-cane in my hand. I looked attentively at the colossus, and could observe no signs of any unusual emotion. I spoke to him in those tones which I flattered myself he considered dulcet. On this he gently waved his ears and twinkled his eyes, as who should say, ‘It’s all right; you are my friend.’ I now called out cheerfully, ‘Salaam, Futteh Ali, Salaam!’ and raised my arm at the same time. To this he responded by lifting his trunk over his head in return for the salute. This last act made assurance doubly sure. I mounted the platform, and as I did so the elephant again flung up his trunk, and opened his mouth, as if to accept with gratitude my sweet and juicy offerings. But his heart was full of treachery. He well knew that with his front feet manacled it would be useless to pursue me even if I had but a few inches start of him. He therefore dissembled with great cleverness and self-command till I had actually leant up against one of his tusks, and had got my hand in his mouth; then he suddenly belched forth a shout of rage, and made a sweep at me with his tusks that sent me flying off the platform into the dust below.... I sat up bareheaded and half-stunned, just in time to see the under-keeper, who had been slumbering behind a pile of equipments all this time, sent with greater force in a backward direction.... The elephant, meanwhile, had thrown off the mask; it was evidently only the shackles on his front feet that prevented him from getting off the platform and finishing us.”

Very few persons would have done the same, but Colonel Barras took Futteh Ali for his Shikar elephant, and he afterwards carried him well in many a dangerous strait. But he was wise enough never to give him a second opportunity to take his life.

Another tusker enraged himself against Colonel Barras for a very slight cause. He was coming back one day, riding this animal, Ashmut Gūj by name, when, as he says, “I determined to see what this beast would do, if I, seated on his back, were to imitate a tiger charging.” Accordingly, he began to mimic that short, hoarse, savage cry, and the elephant, who was not at all deceived, did nothing but raise his trunk. The mahout, however, warned him to desist. “Every time you make that noise,” said he, “the elephant points his trunk over his back and takes a long sniff to inform himself as to which of his passengers is trying to vex him.” Barras stopped at once, but the evil had been done.

“On arriving at the bungalow,” the Colonel continues, “I had quite forgotten this little incident. Not so Ashmut Gūj. At the word of command he bent his hind legs and allowed the three natives to slip off his back in succession. I was the last to dismount, and as I touched the ground the elephant rose with a swift motion, and aimed a fearful kick at me with his enormous club-like hind foot. I started forward, so as just to escape the blow, which would, of course, have annihilated me. This elephant would never forgive me for the indignity I had put upon him. Always upon dismounting he would try to rise, so as to repeat his manœuvre, and it was necessary to make him kneel down completely before I got off. Nor would I ever again feed him from my hand, as I believe that if he could have got hold of me he would have trampled me.”

There is a tragic story told by the same author, of an elephant who was “must.” His keeper did not know it, and, in fact, could not be persuaded that such was the case.

Barras left Neemuch with a number of elephants, and among the rest an old friend and favorite of his, Roghanath Gūj, whose mahout, Ghassee Ram, had been in charge of him for eighteen years and thus acquired a very great influence over the animal. Colonel Barras, who had not seen this beast for some time, was at once struck by the indifference displayed to his expressions of friendliness, and to those little presents of sweets which these creatures enjoy so much. Evidently Roghanath Gūj was changed; ill, perhaps? No, said and swore his keeper, there was nothing the matter. His dulness, that sombre air which excited surprise and suspicion, was nothing more than a little irritability caused by the extremely hot weather. So Barras yielded his better judgment to greater experience, and the consequence was that the next day, while beating for a tiger, the elephant suddenly rushed upon one of the attendants, and would have killed him if the man had not taken off his turban and left it on a bush, while he himself slipped down into the shade of a deep ravine. From this time forth Roghanath Gūj was picketed by himself.

“Two days after,” says Barras, “we arrived at a small village,”--Mehra,--“and close to it there were some enormous Banyan trees, under which the elephants were secured. Opposite to them, on the other side of a small clearing, stood our little camp. Here, after a long and unsuccessful day’s beating after a wary tiger, we enjoyed our late dinner, and had just sought our couches, clad for the night in our light sleeping-suits, when a burst of affrighted cries broke upon our ears. The tumult proceeded from the direction of the great tree where Roghanath Gūj stood in solitude.

“We instantly rushed for our guns, and seized a hurricane lamp. We made all haste in our slippered feet to the scene of action. As we got within twenty yards of the elephant, Ghassee Ram (his driver) called to us to halt. The animal, he said, was obeying him, and if nothing further incensed him, he would be able to tie up his hind legs with a rope, when he would be incapable (the fore-limbs being already chained) of doing any more mischief. So we stood where we were, and waited in great anxiety, whilst we could hear the mahout uttering the word Sōm-Sōm, which is the order for an elephant to keep his hind quarters towards any one who may be washing, or otherwise attending to him. The night was as dark as pitch; nothing could be seen. According to the different cries of the excited people, however, it was clear that something had happened to the under-keeper of Roghanath Gūj. Some said he was dead, some that he had escaped from his terrible assailant. I called to the other elephant-keepers, but they had all gone with their animals, I knew not whither, on the first alarm.

“Meanwhile Ghassee Ram was left quite alone to deal with the enraged beast. Of course we talked to him all the time, and were prepared to rush in and fire, as well as we could, if he called upon us to do so. Every chance, however, would have been against our disabling the elephant, who, maddened by such wounds as he might have received, would have worked untold destruction during the long dark hours of a moonless night. To the pluck of Ghassee Ram must be ascribed the avoidance of such a calamity. In a few minutes, which seemed an age, the mahout called out that we might advance. We did so, and never shall I forget the weirdness of the scene that was lighted up by the bright rays of the lamp I carried.

“Under the tree, and with his back to its stem, towered the dark form of the elephant, whilst his mahout, a mere speck, stood a little to his right. No other living being was visible, but close to the animal, on the opposite side from Ghassee Ram, lay a small, shapeless object, which a second glance showed to be the missing man. The elephant, with his ears raised, seemed to be keeping guard over his victim, and would probably kill any one who should attempt to remove the body, which lay within reach of his trunk. Still, this must be done, and at once, for life might yet be lingering in the shattered frame. I therefore gave the hurricane lamp to the mahout, and ordered him to swing it up in the elephant’s face, and call out his name at the same time. Ghassee Ram, from the long habit of commanding this huge animal, had acquired some powerful tones. As he swung the lamp, that hung by a large ring, in the elephant’s face, and cried out ‘Roghanath Gūj, Roghanath Gūj,’ the animal seemed deeply impressed. As the light ascended for the third time towards his dazzled eyes, I darted from between my two friends, who stood covering the elephant with their guns, and drew forth the unfortunate keeper. He was terribly mangled, and quite dead.” This elephant was semi-delirious, and in that state the wild beast nature, which had been covered by a thin layer of educational polish, came out under the stimulus of some passing irritation. His mahout saw the man struck down, and interfered; but the animal was only restrained by his voice for a moment, and then completed the murder. He was not wholly demented, however; for Colonel Barras says, “I could not but be touched by the affection this huge creature displayed, even in his madness, towards the only two people he loved,--Ghassee Ram and myself. I fed him every day from my hand, and he never failed to clank his heavy chains, and turn round to watch me till I disappeared in my tent on leaving him.”

It is probable that many persons whose minds are made up on the subject of elephants, may see nothing in this account but a case of perversion due to disease, and will pass by the elephant’s evident power of self-restraint and discrimination as of no significance; contending that Roghanath Gūj, like all his kind, was naturally benevolent and amiable. Likewise, that the vagaries belonging to certain forms of mental alienation, temporary and chronic, are of the most eccentric and various character, and that this instance proves nothing with regard to the elephant’s inherent nature. As a mere matter of reasoning, the objection is valid, and logically it is unanswerable; but, perhaps, some of those who believe that these brutes possess virtues of which most men are nearly destitute, will inform the world why “must”-delirium or actual insanity in an elephant, always takes the form of homicidal mania.

THE LION

“From the earliest times,” says the writer on this subject in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” “few animals have been better known to man than the lion.” It is precisely because of this knowledge, for the most part purely imaginary, that the real lion is less known than almost any of the other great wild beasts. Not so much in this case on account of the paucity of facts as from a plethora of fiction, his actual character has very imperfectly come to light.

Since Aristotle there have always been naturalists who contended for two species of these animals, and sometimes more.

In Greece, classification was made on the basis of size; in Rome, upon that of color. With regard to the first, Sir Samuel Baker remarks that the lions of Cutch and Guzrat are perhaps not so large as their African congeners; but according to Dr. Jerdon (“Mammals of India”) measurements show that they are fully equal in this respect. Gérard, Livingstone, and others notice very discernible local contrasts in bulk among them in different parts of Africa itself, and it has been maintained by many that the lion grows smaller as one goes south from the Atlas. Major Smee has also been largely followed in his opinion that the Asiatic, or more particularly the Indian, lion is maneless. Dr. Blyth, however, was able to demonstrate from the specimens in the Calcutta Museum that this was not the case, and his view of the accidental character of this deficiency is no doubt the true one. Frederick Courteney Selous (“A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa”) paid particular attention to this feature, and he states that “out of fifty male lion skins, scarcely two will be found alike in the color or length of mane”; he adds that, judging from the same facts which those who multiply natural groups rely upon, “it would be as reasonable to suppose that there are twenty species as two.”

This is but a hint at those discrepancies which have arisen from attaching different values to external and secondary characteristics. Antagonisms of this kind are overabundant, still there is no doubt that wherever lions now exist, they are specifically the same. There is but one genus of lion, with a single species, whose members vary in size, skin-appendages, color, temper, and habits, with the physiography of those provinces they inhabit, and of their human population, with breed, age, temperament, special environment, and their personal experience of men and things.

Sir Samuel Baker (“The Rifle and Hound in Ceylon”) remarks in the course of his observations upon the Cingalese buffalo that no individual opinion upon the traits and disposition of an animal “can be depended upon,” unless its pursuit “has been followed as a sport by itself.” The results of many hunters’ experiences are, however, on record, and so far as facts go, we are actually possessed of a more varied and extensive acquaintance with the species than any individual contact with it would be likely to give.

There is much that is inadequate and also illusory in Gérard’s descriptions. Still, he met the formidable adversaries he encountered in a heroic spirit, and had seen them face to face too often not to be disabused of many errors. The sultan of the desert as known by him did not fear man, was not abashed in his presence, and could not be quelled by his eye. On the contrary, an attempt to stare him out of countenance was, as Sir Samuel Baker observes, the surest means to provoke an attack. Gérard’s experience carried him too far. He only knew the lions of Algeria and Oran, but he thought that these animals were the same everywhere. Such is not the case. The race is now extinct in great areas where it was once distributed. No trace of it is left in many countries of Asia Minor, and it is dying out in Western Asia and India. In some regions man has exterminated the lion or driven him away, and there are other districts where this animal has learned that the battle nearly always goes against him, and where he now has to be forced to fight. On the other hand, certain tribes cower before lions, and this does not fail to change the relations they sustain towards mankind.

This imposing animal makes its appearance in art and literature very early. Frequent mention is made of it in the Cuneiform tablets and Hebrew Scriptures. In Pentaur’s Egyptian Epic upon the War of Rameses II. against the Cheta or Hittites, lions are said to have accompanied the king’s chariot, and fought as the Greek mastiffs (the dogs of Molossos) did at Marathon, or those of the British during Cæsar’s invasion. Herodotus (“Polymnia”) states that when Xerxes’ hordes were moving in the country that lay between the rivers Nestos in Abedra, and Achelous of Acarnania, the camel trains suffered much loss from the attacks of these animals. He informs us that their range was restricted to this district, and expresses his surprise that camels, being creatures that these lions had never seen and might have been supposed to shun, were their especial victims. After Herodotus, when the Greeks began to write about everything that attracted their attention, much was said in one way or another concerning lions, but it amounted to no more than the little that can be found in Roman archives. It really seems as if classic writers left out on purpose everything that one would have cared most to know. Not even the minute and laborious scholarship of the sixteenth century, devoted as it mainly was to the explication of antiquity, has succeeded in extracting from these records any information which is at all commensurate with the opportunities afforded for observation in ancient times. The lion occupied an exceptional position then as now; he was a favorite subject for poetic allusion, for epigram, and rhetorical flourishes. But his character was as much a conventional one at that time as it is at present. This may be also seen in art, where, whether sculptured and painted, or set in mosaics, he was depicted in what were supposed to be characteristic attitudes from Persepolis and the rock tablets of Kaf to the Sea of Darkness, and from the banks of the Orontes to the cities of Africa. He impressed antiquity as he has done the modern world, and so far as disposition and personal qualities are concerned, most of what was known or thought then might have been condensed into the modern statement of his traits given in the French “Cyclopédie”; namely, that he was “si fort et si courageux, qu’on l’a appellé le roi des animaux.”

What amount of truth there is in this view we shall see; in the mean time it is natural enough to regret that those who might have accomplished so much, have in fact done so little. Varro, Columella, Aulus Gellius, and others wrote on game and hunting, but classic notices of a venatio in the amphitheatre are as terse and colorless as entries in a log-book. Marsian boars, or wolves from the Apennines were the most formidable creatures an ancient Italian could find in his own country, and Virgil congratulates himself that such was the case. “Rabidæ tigres absunt et saeva leonum semina.” But the scribblers in prose and verse who expatiated upon fish-ponds, nets, gins, snares, Celtic, Lycaonian, and Umbrian hounds, with all the appliances of petty sport, where were they while the Ludi Circenses were going on? How was it that these men, who gossiped about everything, never chatted with the keepers of that great Vivarium near the Prænestine gate, where there were often wild beasts enough to stock the menageries of the modern world? Why did they not tell of the fleets laden with such cargoes that came to Ostia, interview the men who brought them as they drank rough Massic together in the taverns under the Janiculum, or report the talk of those dark satellites who guarded the vivaria of the Colosseum or theatre of Marcellus?

The reason was this: independently of everything else, a Roman of those days was satiated with the sight of actual slaughter until all that now fascinates the attention and enthralls the interest of a reader of adventures had become insipid. The bestiarii, or wild beast fighters, were a class apart from other gladiators. So far as our meagre supply of information goes, these men did not meet a royal tiger as a Ghoorka now does; that is to say, did not trust to perfect nerve, training, and activity, to avoid the brute’s onset, and slay it by striking at advantage; they appeared in armor and actually fought with sword or spear. Considering the style in which lions and tigers combat, one cannot divine the use made of any defensive panoply, which, so far as we can judge, would seem to have been more of an encumbrance than an aid. An iron sword two feet long (for the much-talked-of Iberian steel was most likely only a good quality of untempered metal) could hardly have availed a hampered man in a hand-to-hand struggle of this kind, except in case of accidents that must have been of rare occurrence. Julius Cæsar’s Thessalian horsemen chased giraffes around the arena until they were exhausted, and then killed them with a dagger thrust at the junction of the spine and head; but it is safe to say that no bestiarius armed with a venabulum went through any performances of this kind with a black rhinoceros. Yet every formidable animal on earth perished upon “a Roman holiday.” That is, however, all we know.

It is now the fashion to say that lions are such timid creatures that they might be expected to do little injury if they got out of their cages in the presence of a crowd. When, writes Plutarch, the city of Megara was stormed by Calamus, their keepers or the authorities loosed those lions kept for the games--“opened their dens, and unchained them in the streets to stop the enemy’s onslaught. But instead of that they fell upon the citizens and tore them in such a manner that their very foes were struck with horror.” Another curious comment upon the timid and retiring behavior of these animals is found in the fact that while they were protected in Africa (preserved for the spectacles) by cruel game laws which deprived people of the natural right of self-defence, the loss of life in that province was so great that it excited compassion even in Rome, and finally led to the mitigation of these statutes by Honorius, and their final abolition during the reign of Justinian.

Moffat (“Missionary Labors and Scenes in South Africa”) had the reputation of knowing more about lions than almost any one else, and it was his opinion that eying them was a very questionable proceeding. Both he and Andersson (“The Lion and the Elephant”) say that this experiment may sometimes apparently succeed, but “under ordinary circumstances” a hungry lion “does not spend any time gazing on the human eye ... but takes the easiest and most expeditious means of making a meal of a man.” It is not very often that things so arrange themselves as to give any one a chance to try what effect can be produced in this way; still everything that could happen has happened, and combining what follows with the statements already made, it would appear that this much-talked-of personal power is a delusion.