Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 70, No. 431, September 1851Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 70, No. 431, September 1851
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
shot a parrot, called out to know if he should fire at the elephant,
which I loudly forbade him to do. The beast broke its way through
the brushwood just at hand. I saw its high back, and took up a safe
position amongst several palm-trees, which all grew from one root,
and were so close together that the elephant could not get at me.
Sale was already up a tree, and told me the elephant had turned
round, and was going back into the chaaba. The brute seemed angry
or anxious about its young one, for we found the ground dug up for
a long distance by its tusk as by a plough. Some shots were fired,
and we thought the Bascha and his horsemen were on the track of the
lion, but they had seen the elephant, and formed a circle round
it. A messenger galloped into camp, and in a twinkling the Arnaut
Abdin Bey came up with part of his people. The elephant, assailed
on all sides by a rain of bullets, charged first one horseman, then
another; they delivered their fire and galloped off. The eyes were
the point chiefly aimed at, and it soon was evident that he was
blinded by the bullets, for when pursuing his foes he ran against
the trees, the shock of his unwieldy mass shaking the fruit from
the palms. The horsemen dismounted and formed a smaller circle
around him. He must already have received some hundred bullets, and
the ground over which he staggered was dyed red, when the Bascha
crept quite near him, knelt down and sent a shot into his left eye,
whereupon the colossus sank down upon his hinder end and died.
Nothing was to be seen of the calf or of the lion, but a few days
later a large male lion was killed by Soliman Kaschef's men, close
to camp, where we often in the night-time heard the roaring of those
brutes."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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