In this unearthly country native legend from ancient days has placed, most appropriately, the death valley of the elephants. There, in a pleasant hollow beside a lake of clear water—reached only by a narrow pass with high walled precipices on either side—these animals make their way from all over the island when they feel the chill drowsiness of approaching death. It has been an interminable procession of the doomed since time began. To the stricken old elephant, the coming of death brings an irresistible nostalgia which draws his faltering feet homeward to this mist-shrouded valley piled high with the white bones of his ancestors. It is his haven of rest from the weariness and disillusion of living. The belief has deep roots in the ancient folk-lore of Ceylon. It has spread all over the East. It is embodied in the Arabian Nights. No man ever has entered this vale of death since Sinbad the Sailor, who was carried there in the trunk of a huge elephant after he had been knocked senseless when the tree in which he was hiding was uprooted by a herd of the animals. Sinbad at last found himself in this valley piled high with bones and knew that he was in the long-sought death place of the elephants. Another Ceylon elephant cemetery is concealed in a dense forest near the ancient sacred city of Anardhupara. It is so well hidden that no man knows its exact location, although all know that it exists. Unless there are such cemeteries, the natives ask, what becomes of the remains of dead elephants? The death of the jungle elephant remains a fantastic mystery. No very serious efforts have been made to provide a solution. Remains of these creatures that have died natural deaths seldom have been found, either in Asia or Africa. Yet obviously the great beasts are mortal, subject to various fatal ailments and to the inevitable decay of age. Evidently when one of them feels death approaching it retires to a place of the dead where it quietly breathes its last and adds its bones to those of the vast multitudes of its race that have gone before it into the unknown. The belief is so strong that there has been a persistent search for these elephant Golgothas for the past century. Such a discovery, especially in Africa, probably would mean inestimable wealth in ivory. But, except for one or two questionable instances cited below, nobody ever has found such a place. Natives sometimes claim to know an approximate location from tradition, although they never have seen it. Zoologists naturally frown upon the idea because of its very weirdness. They explain that the remains of very few tropical animals ever are found and that the elephant, for all its bulk, need be considered no great exception. Vultures, jackals, hyenas and other carrion eaters soon would tear the flesh from the bones. Insects would bear away the fragments they left. Jungle vegetation rapidly would cover and hide the naked skeleton.