I Was Sitting On
The Ground In A Place Where There Was Scarcely Room For Him To Pass,
And Yet
He was so noble and gentle that I never thought of getting up,
even though his ponderous feet just touched
Me, and I ate my lunch
within the swing of his huge proboscis, but he stood quite still,
except that he flapped his "ears" and squirted water over himself. Each
elephant has his own driver, and there is quite a large vocabulary of
elephant language. The mahout carried an invaluable knife-weapon,
called a parang, broadest and heaviest at the point, and as we passed
through the jungle he slashed to right and left to clear the track, and
quite thick twigs fell with hardly an effort on his part.
After traveling for several hours we came upon a kampong under palms
and nutmeg trees, and then dismounted and took our lunch, looking out
from deep shadow down upon the beautiful river lying in the glory of
the noonday sun, its banks bright with birds and butterflies. The
mahout was here among friends, and the salutations were numerous. If
nose-rubbing as a form of greeting is practiced I have never seen it.
What I have seen is that when one man approaches another, or is about
to pay a visit, he joins his hands as if in supplication, and the other
touches them on both sides, and afterward raises his hands to his lips
and forehead. It is a courteous looking mode of salutation.
At this point the Singhalese said that the natives told him that it was
possible to ford the Perak, but that the mahout said that the elephant
was a "diver," and would probably dive, but that there was no danger to
us except of getting very wet. I liked the prospect of a journey on the
other side, so we went down a steep bank into the broad, bright, river,
and putting out from the shore, went into the middle, and shortly the
elephant gently dropped down and was entirely submerged, moving
majestically along, with not a bit of his huge bulk visible, the end of
his proboscis far ahead, writhing and coiling like a water snake every
now and then, the nostrils always in sight, but having no apparent
connection with the creature to which they belonged. Of course we were
sitting in the water, but it was nearly as warm as the air, and so we
went for some distance up the clear, shining river, with the tropic sun
blazing down upon it, with everything that could rejoice the eye upon
its shores, with little beaches of golden sands, and above the forest
the mountains with varying shades of indigo coloring.
There would have been nothing left to wish for if you had been there to
see, though you would have tried to look as if you saw an elephant
moving submerged along a tropical river every day with people of three
races on his back!!
The Singhalese said, "I'm going to take you to Koto-lamah; no European
has been there since the war.
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