"Have you seen a lot of elephants already?" he asked me once.
"Oh, hundreds," I answered.
"And do you know", he said, "that long ago when the Portuguese first arrived here and started buying up ivory, they were struck by the fact that Africans didn't have a great deal of it. Why, they wondered? After all, the tusks are very rugged and longlasting, and if it is difficult for them to hunt down an elephant for its ivory - they usually did this by chasing the animal into a hole they had dug earlier - then why don't they collect the tusks from elephants that have already died, and whose corpses are doubtless lying somewhere? They suggested this idea to their African middlemen, but heard something astonishing by way of reply: there are no dead elephants, there are no elephants cemeteries. The Portuguese were intrigued. How do elephants die? Where are the remains? At issue were the tusks, the ivory, and the large sums of money they commanded.
"The manner in which elephants die was a secret Africans long guarded from the white man. The elephant is sacred and so is his death. Everything sacred is surrounded by an impenetrable mistery . What caused the elephant to be so admired was that he had no enemies in the animal world. No other beast could conquer him. He could die (in the past) only a natural death. It occorred usually at dusk, when the elephants came to the water. They would stand at the edge of a lake or a river, reach out far with their trunks, and drink. But the day would come when a tired old elephant could not longer raise his trunk, and to drink clear water he would have to walk farther and farther out into the lake. His legs would sink into the muck, deeper and deeper. The lake pulled him into its cavernous interior. He fought for a time, thrashed about ,attempted to extract himself from the bog and get back to the shore, but his own weight was so great, and the pull of the lake's bottom so paralyzing, that finally the animal would lose its balance, fall, and vanish under the water forever.
"There," Dr. Patel finished,"on the bottoms of our lakes, are the age-old elephant cemeteries."
de um livro que descobri cá,e que duvido que descobrisse senão estivesse por estes lados (mais uma das maravilhas do SVE), The Shadow of the Sun, do fantástico jornalista/repórter/escritor polaco Ryszard Kapuściński.
Glossário:
ivory = marfim
tusks = dentes de elefante
trunk = tromba
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