The natives, to account for this popular belief, declare that the survivors of the herd bury such of their companions as die a natural death.[169] It is curious that this belief was current also amongst the Greeks of the Lower Empire; and Phile, writing early in the fourteenth century, not only describes the younger elephants as tending the wounded, but as burying the dead: Ὅταν δ’ ἐπιστῇ τῆς τελευτῆς ὁ χρόνος Κοινοῦ τέλους ἄμυναν ὁ ξένος φέρει.[170] The Singhalese have a further superstition in relation to the close of life in the elephant: they believe that, on feeling the approach of dissolution, he repairs to a solitary valley, and there resigns himself to death. A native who accompanied Mr. Cripps, when hunting, in the forests of Anarajapoora, intimated to him that he was then in the immediate vicinity of the spot “_to which the elephants come to die_,” but that it was so mysteriously concealed, that although every one believed in its existence, no one had ever succeeded in penetrating to it. At the corral which I have described at Kornegalle, in 1847, Dehigame, one of the Kandyan chiefs, assured me it was the universal belief of his countrymen, that the elephants, when about to die, resorted to a valley in Saffragam, among the mountains to the east of Adam’s Peak, which was reached by a narrow pass with walls of rock on either side, and that there, by the side of a lake of clear water, they took their last repose.[171] It was not without interest that I afterwards recognised this tradition in the story of _Sinbad of the Sea_, who in his Seventh Voyage, after conveying the presents of Haroun al Raschid to the king of Serendib, is wrecked on his return from Ceylon, and sold as a slave to a master who employs him in shooting elephants for the sake of their ivory; till one day the tree on which he was stationed having been uprooted by one of the herd, he fell senseless to the ground, and the great elephant approaching wound his trunk around him and carried him away, ceasing not to proceed until he had taken him to a place where, his terror having subsided, _he found himself amongst the bones of elephants, and knew that this was their burial place_.[172] It is curious to find this legend of Ceylon in what has, not inaptly, been described as the “Arabian Odyssey” of Sinbad; the original of which evidently embodies the romantic recitals of the sailors returning from the navigation of the Indian Seas, in the middle ages,[173] which were current amongst the Mussulmans, and are reproduced in various forms throughout the tales of the _Arabian Nights_. APPENDIX TO CHAPTER III. As ÆLIAN’S work on _the Nature of Animals_ has never, I believe, been republished in any English version, and the passage in relation to the training and performance of elephants is so pertinent to the present inquiry, I venture to subjoin a translation of the 11th chapter of his 2nd book.