I Can Hardly Write, For A Little Wah-Wah, The Most
Delightful Of Apes, Is Hanging With One Long, Lean Arm Round My Throat,
While With Its Disengaged Hand It Keeps Taking My Pen, Dipping It In
The Ink, And Scrawling Over My Letter.
It is the most winsome of
creatures, but if I were to oppose it there is no knowing what it might
do, so I will take another pen.
The same is true of an elephant. I am
without knowledge of what it may be capable of!
Before I came I dreamt of howdahs and cloth of gold trappings, but my
elephant had neither. In fact there was nothing grand about him but his
ugliness. His back was covered with a piece of raw hide, over which
were several mats, and on either side of the ridgy backbone a shallow
basket, filled with fresh leaves and twigs, and held in place by ropes
of rattan. I dropped into one of these baskets from the porch, a young
Malay lad into the other, and my bag was tied on behind with rattan. A
noose of the same with a stirrup served for the driver to mount. He was
a Malay, wearing only a handkerchief and sarong, a gossiping, careless
fellow, who jumped off whenever he had a chance of a talk, and left us
to ourselves. He drove with a stick with a curved spike at the end of
it, which, when the elephant was bad, was hooked into the membranous
"flapper," always evoking the uprearing and brandishing of the
proboscis, and a sound of ungentle expostulation, which could be heard
a mile off.
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