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You will think, perhaps, that they were afraid of being stung by the serpents that served the Gorgons instead of hair or of having their heads bitten off by their ugly tusks or of being torn all to pieces by their brazen claws. Well, to be sure, these were some of the dangers, but by no means the greatest nor the most difficult to avoid.
In almost every home there are curios and pieces of furniture in which ivory has either been overlaid or inserted as panels. At one time it was much used for overlays, and in very thin plates made up into all kinds of decorative models. There are carved tusks from Africa and India, and quaint native curios made of ivory cunningly wrought.
Nor must we here omit that great variety of arms with which nature has differently fortified the bodies of several kind of animals, such as claws, hoofs, and horns, teeth, and tusks, a tail, a sting, a trunk, or a proboscis.
It was enormous, unearthly; a survivor perhaps of some ancient species that lived before the Flood, or at least a very giant of its kind. Its grey-black sides were scarred as though with fighting. One of its huge tusks, much worn at the end, for evidently it was very old, gleamed white in the moonlight. The other was broken off about halfway down its length.
The tusks of the great bull that killed poor Khiva scaled one hundred and seventy pounds the pair, so nearly as we could judge. As for Khiva himself, we buried what remained of him in an ant-bear hole, together with an assegai to protect himself with on his journey to a better world.
'He is a beast, more savage than the boar that grinds its tusks within his country's forests. 'Why speakest thou then of hope? 'I spoke of certainty. I did not mention hope. 'Dear Honain, my brain is weak; but I can bear strange things, or else I should not be here. I feel thy thoughtful friendship; but indeed there need no winding words to tell my fate. Pr'ythee speak out.
Some of these, however, such as horns, hooves, and tusks, are so little permeated by protoplasm that they cannot rank much higher than the tools of the second degree, which come next to them in order.
At 12.5 stopped at a forest to fill up with wood. While looking for wood, a soldier found a dead elephant with tusks that weighed about 120 lbs. I gave him a present of five dollars, also one dollar to Saat for having recovered from the sunken vessel the cooking pots and muskets. "Wind very strong from north. The north wind always commences at about 7 A.M. and increases in power as the sun rises.
In this species the females are also provided with tusks though not of such size as in the males whereas the female of the Indian elephant has either no tusks at all, or they are so small as to be scarcely perceptible outside the skin of the lips. In Africa the elephant exists only in a state of nature. None of the nations upon this little-known continent tame or train him to any purpose.
"Overbearing is not the word, cousin," interrupted Nicholas; "he is as proud as a peacock, and would trample upon us all, and gore us too, like one of the wild bulls of Bowland, if we would let him have his way. But I would treat him as I would the bull aforesaid, a wild boar, or any other savage and intractable beast, hunt him down, and poll his horns, or pluck out his tusks."
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