Voices; Birth-Marks; The Man and the Elephant Part 37

THE MAN AND THE ELEPHANT

In the name of G.o.d, the compa.s.sionate, the merciful, who created the soul and gave to the tongue words of wisdom, Listen! and I will tell you the story of a king and an elephant; of a man who rose above environment and of an elephant who was a victim of it; though this is not the rule.

Let me ill.u.s.trate. If a hog is shifted from the sty to a state of nature, he lifts his snout from the mud and in time acquires the courage of a wild boar; if a man returns to a state of nature, he becomes a savage. Take an Indian, educate him in your great school Harvard; if he returns to his tribe, he cuts the seat from his trousers and wraps himself in a blanket. The desert nomads, wandering over the site of the birthplace of civilization, philosophy and religion, scarcely glance at the half-buried ruins about them, and live as did their fathers five thousand years ago.

In your youth, do not let conceit shut your mind to the acquisition of wisdom. Do not think that the world was in darkness until you were born.

Old age will shatter hope and you will lose confidence in your generation and become an ancestor worshiper, because you are birth-marked mentally and physically by your ancestors; because old age loves youth, and the present the past, and contrasts the joys and sports of childhood with the toil and pain and poverty of old age; because the evil days have come, the clouds return after the rain, the house you live in trembles, your grinders cease because they are few, your windows are darkened; and having eaten, you know you are naked and are ashamed and afraid.

Solomon the Wise, philosopher and preacher, says: "All is vanity * * *

one generation pa.s.seth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever. * * * Fear G.o.d and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man."

The Story.

More than five thousand years before the birth of our prophet Muhammed, The Praised One; even before Ur was; the ancestors of King Surgulla, who belonged to a Turanian tribe, came down from the Heights of Elam on the east, into the plain country and finally settled near Nun-ki, that is, the place of the first water, on the left bank of the Euphrates.

Here was the temple of Hea, the water G.o.d; here the palm trees grew in a great garden watered by crystal springs; which place the Jews, a modern people, call the Garden of Eden. Here sat the fathers in judgment under a great palm tree and the chief mufti read from the tablets:

"When the upper region was not yet called heaven, And the lower region was not yet called earth, And the abyss of Hades had not yet opened its arms, Then the chaos of waters gave birth to all of them And the waters were gathered together into one place."

The first settlement of tents grew into a city and was called the City of The Good G.o.d, Urugudda, which in time was shortened to Eridu. Eridu enjoying several centuries of peace and prosperity, became the capital of a great nation; a seat of learning, philosophy and religion and architecturally beautiful. Its many white public buildings, palaces and temples of fretted marble and porphyry with their red and green tiled roofs and cupolas and gold crescent-crowned minarets, resplendent under a tropic sun, excited the cupidity of every bold robber, who, riding from the desert, viewed its greatness from the distant sand hills.

The people of Girsu were nomads; and worshiped the sun, the moon and water. Their chief had a half grown son, born to sit in the light of the sun, Chalginna. His sole possessions were a light, keen spear, a swift white camel, a water bottle made from a goat skin and a mat on which to sleep. In the stillness of the night as he rested on his mat of camel cloth, though he slept too soundly to hear the roar of the camels or the bleating of the goats or the barking of the jackal, he saw the city and dreamed of its conquest and pillage. Each morning fearful that during the night something might have happened to it, he rode the miles across the desert to the highest of the sand hills, from which with eyes keen as an eagle's, he looked, the while whetting his wolf-like appet.i.te to feed upon it.

In the city there was a boy his own age, the son of the king, and nearly as strong and brave as he, who day after day was drilled to take his father's place; and who had dreams of empire more extensive than his father's. When he was grown, he journeyed with a considerable retinue eastward into Persia, where he was to marry the daughter of a great prince. It was well his caravan guard was strong; because Chalginna, who had gathered about him near a hundred kindred spirits ruled by his fiercer spirit hovered upon its flanks, as a band of hungry wolves from the shelter of the thicket eye the lambs while the shepherd is about and lick their chops in antic.i.p.ation of mutton at the first lapse of vigilance.

The band reasoning that the wedding party, returning, would be richer by the princess and her dowry, deferred their attack; but reckoned not that part of that dowry would be a dozen elephants, the first brought into the valley of the Euphrates.

In a seemingly boundless desert, where the hills of sand were shifted by the winds and famine and thirst held cheerless dominion, they charged the caravan; but their camels balked and ran away, never before having seen or scented such monsters. Two, crazed by the sight of the great beasts, lost their heads and charged alone, bearing their now unwilling riders who rolled off and sought to hide in the sand drifts. The prince and his mahout, on a young male elephant hunted them. The elephant threshed the camels into helpless cripples and the prince killed the two robbers with shafts from his cross-bow.

This failure taught Chalginna a lesson. When the elephants were placed to pasture in the rich river plains; under cover of the night, he drove his war camels into their vicinity, until they knew the herd and the herd knew the camels. The boldest of his men provided themselves with short staffs, tipped with an iron point and hook, first walked among the elephants and then rode about upon their heads as did their mahouts. All the elephants grew to know and mind them, except Gisco, the young bull which the prince rode. He trumpeted wrathfully and beat about dangerously with his trunk whenever a Semite or camel approached him.

Seven years have pa.s.sed since the marriage of the prince. Chalginna, first captain of the robber band, then chief of his tribe is now ruler of Yemen and head of a great confederacy of desert tribes. Erigalla is king of Eridu, having succeeded his father.

Each of his caravans is pillaged or made to pay tribute and his subjects are kidnapped and held for ransom, by Chalginna. It is impossible to follow the robber into the desert or to corner him in battle; because when attacked, his force riding camels, scatters as chaff across the desert of loose sand; and neither horses nor elephants nor man can follow.

There are now thirty-three elephants, Gisco the bull, which bears the king's howdah, is leader of the herd and knows no master except his mahout and the king.

One night, the uproar and trumpeting of the elephants awoke the city, though their pasture was more than a mile down the river. A company of hors.e.m.e.n sent to investigate reported that seven of the elephants were missing and the king's great elephant was badly wounded, having thirty spear heads buried in his fleshy sides and many wounds about the head and neck; while trampled into the earth about his feet or torn and maimed almost beyond identification of form were the bodies of seven camels and four of Chalginna's troopers.

King Erigalla sent out five hundred hors.e.m.e.n and a hundred and fifty chariots to recover his elephants. When they came to the camp of Chalginna, he did not run but gave battle and drove them back to the very gates of the city. Then he dared the king to meet him in the great river valley; but the king declined, feeling that now he should reserve his strength, expecting an a.s.sault upon the city.

Again by night Chalginna visited the river pastures, having a dual purpose; one was to kill the bull elephant, but he had been taken to the palace garden, where, soothed by the cooling spray from the great fountain, he was being nursed back to his great strength; the other was to cut down a great tree and a number of saplings, which were dragged to the desert camp by thirty work camels and need in the construction of a portable ram. The great tree trunk was rigged to swing from a frame on raw hide belts and a platform built on either side on which men might stand and, grasping pegs driven in the log, propel it back and forth with great force. Above the whole Chalginna built an oval canopy of saplings, broad enough not only to cover the machine, but to shield the four great elephants which would bear it. When finished the strongest of his men, twelve on each side, took places on the platforms; and for some days men and elephants were drilled in its manipulation. When the training was completed, Chalginna having gathered six thousand troopers, five thousand on camels and a thousand hors.e.m.e.n, at twilight started on the march against the city of Eridu. The portable ram, suggesting an immense land tortoise, led the advance; Chalginna and his staff rode beside it on the other elephants and the troopers followed.

Gisco, the king's bull elephant, though fully recovered, was still chained to a stake in the palace garden. There he stood, swaying his great body, feeding upon rank and tender rushes brought from the river marsh; and to drive away the flies and reduce the heat occasionally sprayed his body and the earth around with water from the fountain. The wind blew from the desert. Shortly past midnight he ceased swaying and lifted his great ears, stood for a moment as a great beast of bronze; then he raised his trunk aloft and trumpeted an alarm that was heard by half the city. The wind had borne to his keen sense of smell the pungent odor of the camel, the scent of the missing from his herd and given warning that his old enemies, Chalginna's troopers, were at hand.

The watchman on the wall looking carefully desertward, saw a great black ma.s.s approaching the main gate and gave a general alarm. The palace is awakened. The king, his mahout and two of his guard come into the garden; slaves having placed the war howdah upon Gisco, they take their places, and the elephant lumbers off towards the great gate. At the gate the king climbs from the howdah into a midwall opening and ascends to the barbican. Looking about, he sees his soldiers in place behind the parapets; the city is on guard; then looking desertward, he sees the black ma.s.s quite near and gradually severs from it Chalginna's tortoise, which he knows is some implement of war and surmises its purpose.

When the tortoise is within fifty feet of the wall, darts and arrows of the besieged are showered upon it, but as it is well shielded by the sapling cover thatched with rawhide, there is no halt until it is against the wall. Then the great ram pounds upon the gate of bronze and iron and the thuds are heard above the noise of conflict. Chalginna has called and is knocking for admittance; and the city trembles.

Barrels of boiling water are poured upon the machine and great stones and darts are cast upon it; but it turns all as a tortoise sh.e.l.l turns rain and the sticks and pebbles of a boy. Then they throw burning pitch and firebrands upon it, but they have so water soaked it that it will not burn.

The gates begin to give and in a last effort to destroy the dread machine Gisco and half dozen elephants loaded with warriors are let out a secret gate and charge upon it. Three of the elephants reached the ram but are so violently a.s.sailed by Chalginna and his staff and the elephants on which they are riding, which turn against their old mates, that they can do nothing more than protect themselves. Gisco strikes at the machine and nearly upsets it. The operator shifts the ram from the gate and drives the great log against his side with such force as to break several of his ribs and knock him to the earth.

Chalginna, who has seen the king in the howdah borne by Gisco, jumps to the back of the fallen elephant, but slips and falls within reach of his trunk; his left arm is seized and broken, almost wrenched from its socket. His followers after rescuing their leader, swarm about the king and overpower him. He is bound and borne to the rear; and Chalginna is lifted back upon his elephant. The gates yield; the robbers enter; and the city is given over to pillage, violence and slaughter.

Many of Erigalla's soldiers are slain, many of the women are made slaves. The queen and her young son, a boy of three years, though the city is searched, cannot be found. Chalginna by conquest becomes its ruler and adopts its standard as his own; an eagle with outstretched wings bearing in her talons the cab of a lion.

On a bare spot, but a few hundred yards beyond the city wall, almost beside the dusty road leading to the great gate; a place where lepers and the blind are wont to sit and beg; Chalginna placed along the edge of a huge, half buried, flat rectangular stone, great cubes of hewn granite four inches apart, so that they formed a little doorless chamber not much larger than one of the granite blocks used in its construction.

The people pa.s.sing said to one another: "Our new king is building a shrine or a tomb."

When finished, except the dropping into place of the cap stone weighing ten tons, the captive king is brought forth and placed within. Then the cap stone is shifted into place and the doorless prison closed upon the prisoner.

Upon the front Chalginna cut this inscription:

"The palace of King Erigalla. His subjects are the beggars and lepers of the city; they may render obeisance to their sovereign; but let no other person dare, or to speak with, save to revile him. He who disobeys shall be made a beggar and blind."

Gisco, the day after the battle, lay where he had fallen. When night came on, driven by thirst to move despite the pain, slowly he rose on his great columnar legs and stumblingly dragged his ungainly body to the river where on the low bank he sank exhausted and filled himself with the tepid water. Screened by a dense growth of water palm and creepers, he lay there for several days; then having recovered sufficiently to move about a bit, fed upon the tender rushes of the marsh.

After many days his strength returned. Going forth to feed in the pastures he found another bull had usurped his place as leader of the herd. After a battle lasting for hours he regained his supremacy.

Chalginna's mahouts, wishing to use the elephants to move some great stones to strengthen the wall came down to drive the herd to the city.

Gisco would not let one of them approach him, but followed after the submissive herd, trumpeting his resentment.

Instinctively he shunned the prison of Erigalla until he sensed his master was within, then pressing his head against the great front stone, backed by his seven tons of bulk he shoved upon it but could not shake or budge it as the stones were set in cement mortar and riveted with bars of iron. Then he pa.s.sed his trunk into one of the apertures; and the captive reached out his arm and stroked the end of it with his hand.

A trooper pa.s.sing on a camel jabbed the elephant in the flank with the point of his spear. He turned more quickly than seemed possible and killed both trooper and camel; then driven to madness by the scent of the nomad horde in possession of the city, or possibly to revenge his master, he charged through the gate, killing and destroying as he went, and for an hour was master of the city.

They set out poisoned fruit to tempt him but he would not eat. They sought to blind him with darts, but his small eyes were uninjured, though his head and great sides bristled with arrows.

At the order of Chalginna, a gang of workmen set a great stake deep in the earth, without the wall beside the road near the great gate and not more than fifty yards from King Erigalla's prison; to this they fixed a few links of heavy chain.

The mahout who had driven him before the city had been sacked was forced by threats of death to bring him to the stake and fasten the chain upon his leg, a few inches above his five great toes; and Gisco too was a prisoner, and so near that when the king spoke his name he heard and answered.

It was well for the sanity of the king in the first months of that imprisonment that the elephant was a fellow prisoner; and by his low trumpetings conveyed to him his sympathy and loyalty. No other being dared, though a dirty beggar woman, bearing a small boy child upon her hip, frequently pa.s.sed, hoping to see the king, but he sat in a corner out of sight, with his head bent forward upon his breast or overcome by despair rolled in the dust upon the floor.

Had the woman seen the face of the king she would not have known him.