I have a theory about it. An elephant’s loose skin is a sort of bag that conceals the most flexible and finely articulated set of muscles in the animal kingdom. He has no bulge of muscles anywhere. They are all as smooth and flat as ribbons, as elastic as rubber, tempered like steel wire. Wherefore he can wheel that vast bulk of his instantly and in a space the size of a tea-table. He can hurl the whole four or five tons of him into action with a single impulse and strike his top speed in a single stride. Place an enemy in front of him, and I believe he can run ten yards or two hundred from a standing start faster than any other creature on legs.
Meantime, the decoys to be used for the noosing in the afternoon had come up from their teak-piling duties in the low country. Seven gigantic beasts, far larger than the captured ones, they moved like conquerors, majestic and grand. It was not to be comprehended that these colossi, the mightiest of the earth’s creatures, were willing servants of those pygmies astride their necks. Yet all through the subsequent proceedings the mahout’s word was law, and I never once saw a tame elephant pricked with the ankus. This is the more remarkable when it is understood that with one exception they had all been wild elephants fewer than ten years before.
After they had been bathed and scraped and holystoned till their hides shone like polished slate, the decoys were led before the Ratemahatmeya to receive the ceremonial anointment with oil and make their salaams. As the great beasts fell on their knees before the old man and made their dumb, strange genuflections of obeisance, my eyes were filled with a picture of the galleries of old Rome and of the German gladiators stooped before some palsied Cæsar, and through my brain pulsed again the echo of their grand and solemn valedictory.
But it was two o’clock, and the ladies of the Ratemahatmeya’s family were in the tower, the village was in the tree-tops, or chattering like schools of monkeys in the undergrowth, and all was ready for the great spectacle of the kraal, the contests in the arena. Kalawane, on the largest elephant, headed the procession of the seven decoys, followed by a small army of spearmen and elephant shikarees, carrying ropes. Each of the decoys bore on his back a mahout and a nooser, the latter armed with a coil of rope noosed at one end and attached at the other to a stout collar around the decoy’s neck.