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And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 11th June 2008

Don’t ask an African elephant to show you his cardiograms

I can’t help liking elephants, and I was delighted to receive from India a silk tie with a pattern of these huge and benevolent beasts, raising their trunks in the traditional gesture which means ‘Good morning and good luck’. I once had a beautiful alabaster elephant, made in Benares in the early 20th century, coloured golden yellow and red. Originally in its howdah had reposed the stately squatting figure of Lord Curzon, when viceroy. But time and tide had removed his Lordship, and in due course a dusting fall broke the saluting trunk. Finally, a riotous Old Etonian, while admiring the piece and boasting to me how many OEs had been viceroys, dropped it on the fireplace tiles and it had to be binned. Curzon himself once lamented, ‘Everything really nice always gets broken by careless servants’, but in this case the vandal was a former Captain of Boats.

John Donne, in his ‘Progress of the Soul’, hails ‘Nature’s great masterpiece, the Elephant’, adding ‘The only harmless great thing’. Well, this may be generally true of the Indian elephant, docile, biddable, hard-working, faithful and affectionate — its intimate and loving relationship with its mahout (known as an oozie in Burma) is akin to marriage. But even an Indian elephant can be dangerous when in must, as we remember from that dark and touching essay by George Orwell, recounting the occasion when he was required to kill one of the great, patient beasts, already recovering from its fit, simply to ‘save face’ and satisfy the expectant villagers. This was when he was an officer in the Burmese police. Would that this wise and saintly man were ruling Burma today!

The African elephant, however, cannot fairly be described as harmless. It is, to begin with, much bigger and stronger. It can — I have seen it — pull up a sizeable tree by the roots, and throw it 20 yards over its shoulder. It does this to eat the tasty bits on the top or just for the hell of it. From my observation, African elephants enjoy displaying their size and strength. A bull elephant killed in the Angolan bush in the 1950s, which can now be seen in Washington’s Smithsonian, must have weighed nine tons when alive and is 12 feet high at the shoulder. Sometimes the tusks reach colossal size. There is a pair in the British Museum which weigh nearly 300 pounds, and the larger of the two is 12 feet long. Its tusk is 18 inches thick. Imagine what a plenitude of precious objects could be made from such a monumental molar! Elephants have been hunted down for their ivory for thousands of years. One of the earliest trading posts in Ancient Egypt was Elephantine Island in the Nile (the hieroglyphics for ivory and the beasts were similar), where the pharaohs’ traders met hunter-chieftains from Central Africa.

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