It was they who dragged to Candahar and Cabul the guns that shook Shere Ali from his Afghan throne and avenged the British Envoy’s murder; and now they are swinging across Africa from the East to meet the steamers coming up the Livingstone from the West, and thus clasp the girdle of commerce round the Dark Continent.
But the narrative of this expedition is so full, as it seems to me, of picturesque interest, that I think it may find a place in these discursive pages.
The animals, then, were supplied by the Poona stud — at the expense of the King of the Belgians — and in marching them along the high road to Bombay, elephants being common objects of the country in that presidency, no exceptional difficulties presented themselves.
Arrived, however, at the seashore, where elephants do not abound, it was discovered that no one knew what to do with the bulky pachyderms, or how to get them off the wharf into the ship. A crowd collected round the strangers, and, while everybody was offering advice, the elephants took fright and charged the council, who precipitately fled. To a practical person, who, it would appear, had remained out of the way while the charging was going on, it then suggested itself, that, as elephants had been slung on board ship during the Abyssinian war, they might be slung again, provided the gear was of elephantine calibre. The weight of an elephant, however, was an unknown quantity, but a general average of twenty tons being mooted was accepted by the company as a safe estimate — an elephant as a rule being something less than three tons. The gear was therefore adapted to a weight of twenty tons, and the
