There are several fairly good hotels at Neura-Ellia, two banking-houses, a church, a club-house, and a large number of private cottages scattered about the hills and valley, overlooking a lake of some two miles in length and a mile in width. This has been stocked with trout, and now affords a liberal supply of that palatable fish to the residents.
Not far away, on the Fort McDonald River, there is a grand waterfall, with a plunge of three hundred perpendicular feet into a dark and narrow chasm. The river approaches this point over a long succession of wild, swirling, and foaming cataracts, reminding one of the rapids above Niagara Falls, though far inferior in breadth and the body of water which they convey. The hoarse anthem and echo accompaniment of the McDonald Falls, when heard for the first time, are truly awe-inspiring.
One has not far to go in the surrounding mountain region to find the haunts of the wild elephants. They are still to be met with in considerable numbers, their capture being considered the great achievement of the chase among hunters of large game. From here Hindustan has drawn its supply of these animals for many centuries. The elephant rarely breeds in servitude while domesticated for the use of man, but in its wild state is a prolific animal, otherwise Ceylon would long since have been cleared of them. The mother elephant carries her infant twenty-two months, and after birth suckles it for two years. The female does not attain her maturity until she is fifteen years old; the male in his twentieth year. The mother elephant gives birth to but one calf at a time; twins have never been known. Small herds range these hills to a height of six thousand feet, where the nights are often frosty and the cold quite severe. Though they are natives of tropical regions, this animal seems to be but little affected by the cold, always avoiding, when it is possible, the direct rays of the sun. This peculiarity is noticeable in them even when they are exhibited in our cold northern climate. Unless aroused by the hunters and driven from deep, cool coverts in the dense forests, the elephant remains hidden during the daytime. Their roaming for forage and water, like that of most wild animals, is altogether nocturnal. Their sustenance is principally the leafage of young shoots of trees, the wild fig being their favorite. The tender roots of the bamboo also form a large source of food supply. Rice, however, is the elephant's choice above all other esculents, and sometimes a small herd will devastate a whole plantation in a single night. The planters generally build a bamboo fence about their rice-fields in the districts liable to be visited by these animals. This would at first thought seem to be entirely insufficient to keep off so powerful a creature, but the fact is that a wild elephant in Ceylon is so wary that he will not trespass upon land thus guarded. Some instinct teaches him to avoid the place and to seek for food elsewhere. A simple rope drawn about a field, it is said, will keep him at a distance. He shrewdly suspects a trap, and has seen so many of his comrades seized upon and carried away into captivity by means of corrals, traps, and ropes, that he has learned to associate the idea of capture with such things, and is constantly on the lookout lest he also fall a victim to the stratagems of the huntsmen. It is common to consider one hundred years as the average period of an elephant's life, but the author has seen an animal doing service in India which was known to exceed this limit by a score of years.