Poor Richard's Printshop

ALL unaware that his fatal beauty would start more trouble than Helen of Troy's once did, the elephant calf later christened Lingga, was born among the tree ferns and cascading lianas of the Ulat—Bulu hills, in Sarawak.

This was an albino elephant calf, a white elephant. And true white elephants are rarer than albino crows, and considered sacred by several small but grimly determined nations of the East.

Lingga's mother was a very large but otherwise undistinguished slate brown cow elephant. Her skin hung in wrinkled folds about the eleven feet height of her gaunt and bony carcass, looking as though the skin had been intended for a much stouter lady. She trumpeted mournfully at the slightest provocation, and between times muttered and grumbled to herself like an ill tempered racing mehari. She was not a monogamist, as most elephants are. She had visited the elephant's Reno at least three times; and this spouse was her fourth. Why she picked him, no one of the human tribe can as much as guess.

Lingga's father, and her spouse, was tall, gaunt and shambling. He was a small eared, eleven feet three inch bull elephant, with five toes on his fore feet, and only four toes on each of the rears—though many elephants have five in back, as well. He walked on what might be termed the very tips of his fingers. But the heels of his hands also met the ground, making a long and huge print.

The father was a dark, bony beast so "left-handed" that at the middle age of forty-five, when Lingga was born to his cow, he had worn through his left tusk until it had snapped off short. He groaned deeply when he had to traverse the jungle from one mud wallow to another, for he suffered more than most of his confreres from the giant elephant leeches which swarmed over his skin.

Just one of these great leeches, which are all equipped with beaks, that let them tap the blood through a solid inch and one half of elephant hide, inflates to_the approximate size of a very fat bologna sausage. And at times, Lingga's carried forty or fifty of them on his body, bobbing and swaying with his movements like so many toy balloons. It is no wonder that the old man was spiritless and ready to groan aloud.

Possibly this had something to do with Lingga's lack of ordinary pigmentation in his thick hide. But his cantankerous nature came to him honestly. Both of his parents had been captured and partially tamed in Sarawak—and then driven-away as of little commercial use and a great deal of trouble. Both parents were grouches. And Lingga was to be an elephant devil, a real rogue. From the very start he was a problem child.

LINGGA weighed about three hundred pounds the day he was born. He was practically nothing but a huge appetite encased in a small, wabbly frame. On his second day, when his legs would support him for short periods of time, he stood 31 inches high. He nursed twelve times that day, swallowing about a gallon and one-half each time. He nursed with his mouth, not with his trunk—as a certain deep rooted superstition has it. In later life he would fill his trunk with water, then squirt it directly into his mouth; but that was a trick yet to be learned.

Even on the third day of his life, the milk was not enough. He supplemented the liquid ration with a little grass and other green stuff. In three weeks' time he was munching the equivalent of half a bale of hay, and gradually weaning himself.

He did something at once that no ordinary elephant child will do. He ran away. True, he went only a quarter mile or so, finding a deep-shaded mud wallow for himself. Even then he avoided bright light, which struck him blind. He squealed and trumpeted and tried to escape when his parents found him and punished him.

Of course they did not understand. They were like the parents of a human child with unsuspected eye trouble. Their instinct was to make Lingga do exactly the things they did, and thus prepare him for the rigors of jungle life.

Lingga was an albino. He had no protective coloration in the irises of his eyes. The bright light tortured him. He tried to get away from it, and into the darkest, coolest jungle depths.

His parents never could understand. They made him a fury. He learned to do any number of mean little tricks with his trunk, like squirting liquid wild honey over the back of his mother, who thought it just some more water—until the ants found it.

Lingga's trunk, which was just like that of his father's, was a constant fascination to the young pachyderm. He could do almost anything with it—and no wonder. There are many more muscles in this proboscis than in the entire body of a human being. The scientist Cuvier has devoted an entire volume to the dissection and first study of these thousands of tiny muscles and their functions. In a way it is as fascinating as the study of the middle ear, or the musculature of expression in a man.¹

"Cuvier: claims there are more than 40,000 muscles in the trunk. I do not feel quite up to believing that, myself, but I can furnish chapter and verse.-A. R.

Lingga's stomach, an immense affair, had a second compartment beside the one used for food. Like a camel, he had this second tank in which he could store water. In adult life this would reach a capacity of ten gallons; and it was intended, of course, as a receptacle in which to store the liquid provision for a long journey, or a dry spell.

There was no lack of water in the jungles of Sarawak, on the northwestern side of the island of Borneo. So every now and then just for amusement, Lingga opened and closed a peculiar arrangement of valves, treating himself—but preferably others—to a sudden warm shower bath.

HE was a mean and incorrigible infant, then a meaner and worse calf. His mother and father never did guess at all why he shunned the sunlight and even the bright light of morning before the sun had risen. He positively had to be gored from behind in order to get obedience, except after sundown. So Lingga sulked, half blind even in ordinary green-gloomed jungle daylight; and had tearing rages during which time he would destroy vegetation—or any other form of forest life he could reach with his terrible trunk.

The result was that he became a true rogue elephant when no more than partially grown. Usually this does not happen until fairly late in adult life; and it does not have to happen at all, if an elephant is well fed and happy.

One queer result was that while he became cunning and shrewd in a low-class way, Lingga never did develop his brain to the full. An elephant's brain, after all allowances are made for bone and air spaces in the cranium, is enormous when compared to that of any other living mammal; It is small inside that great skull; which is large for the simple purpose of allowing some place for all the longer trunk muscles to attach. But an elephent's brain is huge and of fully as good quality as that of a fine horse or dog. It can be trained—or, it can life, falloe and be stored with mere meanness and low cunning. It has been proved by experiment that an elephant can forget something he has learned. But it takes him several years to do it.

Two years passed. Lingga left his parents before they were really through with him—though they probably did or not hunt very hard for him that last time he ran away. He had made life troublesome for them every minute of his existence. Now he was hidden in a jungle wallow, and forced to use his brain for himself. His tusks were still mere nubbins of ivory, no good as weapons.

When he grew a little older, these tusks would go back a full thirty inches into his head, be firmly anchored like the incisor teeth are in most animals, and be deadly weapons. But when his first life-and-death crisis came, his bout with the striped terror, he could not have gored a jellyfish—let alone a hungry ten foot tiger.

LINGGA was one-third grown as far as height and bulk were concerned. He had tried to join two or three small herds, approaching them at night. But none of the other elephants of the jungle would have anything to do with him. Perhaps his reputation had spread. More likely he carried with him, as do some men, an emanation of devil in very physical presence. Each time he made overtures to a herd, the bulls faced him, lowered their heads—and waited in grim silence. If he did not take the hint, they would charge. They would gore and trample the unwanted newcomer.

Linigga suffered this just once. For some reason, perhaps his youth, the bulls did not kill him, though they left him bleeding and bruised, almost unable to drag himself erect and stumble off into the coolness of the dark swamp.

In later years the white elephant would try every rutting season to induce or cut off a likely looking cow, for a mate. He never succeeded in his own efforts. He would have to wait—but that is ahead of his story.

Each time he was denied, Lingga ran amok, tearing through the jungle blindly, tearing up saplings, charging bamboo villages, going on regardless. The two apertures on his forehead exuded sticky fluid—always a sign of terrible temper, if not of actual madness, in an elephant.

Through the Sarawak jungle ranged plenty other single male elephants—rogues. No female elephant ever leaves her native herd except by accident, or when her turn comes to die of old age. Plenty of cantankerous old males leave, however, or are expelled because the rest of the herd, their relatives and comrades, refuse to stand for their idiosyncrasies any longer.

Lingga fought three older rogues, and was ignominiously put to flight each time. That was really not strange, since he was only six years of age, and these soured oldsters were at least fifty, perhaps much older. Lingga's frame had grown, and he had put on weight fast, however, so probably none of the real rogues thought of him as being more than a cocky but rather undersized elephant.

He bore scars from the tusks of these rogues; but the scars were nothing at all to the claw marks he got from Stripes. Even at that he was supremely lucky to have his life, for the Borneo tiger, first cousin to the Bengal tiger, likes young elephant meat the same way a husky young human football player likes six filet mignons rare, all on a platter before him.

STRIPES was scrawny. She had two kittens nursing, getting big enough so she had to leave them occasionally to pull down food. And by sheer chance her jungle lair was just one-half mile from the almost-dark mud wallow Lingga used frequently through the daylight hours. He did his foraging at night, as did she.

It all happened and was over in eighty seconds. Night was approaching. Lingga heaved himself, squirted water over his back, and lazily got to his feet. His trunklike legs made sucking sounds in the mire as he clambered to firmer footing.

The tigress heard. She came swiftly, scenting young elephant. Lingga no more than reached the cane brake of shore when two blazing green eyes loomed. He snorted, tried to dodge as the tigress leapt.

In vain. She landed squarely on his back and forehead. Her powerful hind legs clawed for the throat, at the same time her fangs tried to bite down through and sever the spinal cord at the neck.

Except for the swamp, Lingga would have died in another minute. As it was, he squealed, snorted, whirled. Blind with pain he started on a run back toward the deep wallow where he had lain.

The first few steps made him stumble. His speed made him up-end, small tail in the air. And the tigress—well, she disappeared in the muck. She was smashed down out of sight under the great forehead of the white elephant; and despite all her clawing, choking and struggle, she stayed right there. After a few more seconds Lingga arose, trumpeted nastily, and then carefully trod with all his weight upon the suffocated body lying limp there in the ooze.

He had won his first great victory, so great a victory it is probable that he did not realize it to the full.

Of course he had gouging wounds. The scars of these claw marks would remain with him till his dying day. But the remarkable fact was that he still lived.

TALES of the great white elephant began to be whispered through the villages, during the fifteen years that followed. Dyaks, vengeful because of a raid which almost totally destroyed one of their stilted towns, hunted him for months—and found him. They found him at night, and that was just too bad for the Dyaks. Their spears and sumpitans must have missed their marks, for seven of the avenging band were left there in the jungle, while the three survivors reached home to tell fearsome tales of the white monster.

Lingga had learned a peculiar pleasure. It was to seize a brown man with his trunk, and bash him against the nearest tree until the brown man came apart.

But during these fifteen years which brought, Lingga to adult strength and stature—and full rogue ferocity—two things were happening in the world of men outside the green jungle. These two factors were to influence the life of the white elephant.

First, over in far away America, a monstrous elephant named Jumbo died. Jumbo had been the idol of-the American circus public, a pachyderm eleven feet four inches tall at the shoulders. Not the largest elephant that ever lived, by far, but the largest ever to be captured and exhibited.

On Jumbo's death, immediately the call went forth: Find a replacement. Find a bigger elephant. So curious was the show psychology of the time, that any pachyderm almost as big as Jumbo had been, simply would not do. Not if he or she lacked a single inch of stature. The American public would gaze and marvel at a new elephant, and pay in their quarters and dollars, but only if the new pachyderm was larger than their oldtime idol, Jumbo. So big game hunters and collectors everywhere made exhaustive inquiries.

The Ringling agent, for instance, cabled the Guico-War of Guzerat, richest of all the Indian independent princes (and sometimes called the Gaekwar of Baroda), asking it His Majesty had ever heard of a twelve foot elephant anywhere in his domain?

"How many do you want?" came back the astounding question-reply, which precipitated a wild rush to that far native state. But it soon developed that the native potentate had merely been trying to please. He never had bothered about the size of his elephants. The largest pachyderm under royal howdah measured only slightly over ten feet at the shoulder....

The brown sultan of Trengganu also bragged that twelve—footers were so common about his domain that they actually got in his hair. But an exhaustive search brought to light only one bony oldster exactly eleven feet tall. He was so ancient and ill-favored that even the disappointed scouts could see no reason to transport him.

So for a period of three years, America mourned Jumbo, and got along somehow with smaller elephants.

* * * * *

THE second world happening which was to affect Lingga was even more significant, though to one who knows little of the East it may sound obscure. The Royal White Elephant of Siam died.

Sir James Brooke, the Englishman who freed Sarawak from the bloody tyranny of Pangeran Makota, in 1847, has written at length concerning sacred white elephants, and their part in Asiatic history. As far back as 1607 Siam, Pego and Aracan engaged in a bloody triangular war over one white elephant. More than 35,000 soldiers were dead, and 200,000 wounded, before a truce came—brought about only because the white elephant in question died.

They took their white elephants seriously in Siam—and still do. It is hard for Occidentals to understand and believe, but the plain fact is that white elephants in Siam are regarded as reverently as a wisp of the beard of the Prophet is regarded by Islam. These elephants are symbols. While not exactly divine in our sense, they stand for success in war, fertility of crops, many sons, and general prosperity for the entire country. Any king or dynasty of kings not possessing and exhibiting such a white elephant, may expect ominous happenings. Famine. Childless wives. Revolution. Death—perhaps under the thousand knives, or some other exquisite Oriental form of torture.

In Siam as a whole, the white elephant of the Court stands next to the king and queen—and even crowds them a bit. He is far more important than the first son, the crown prince. He is shown to the people twice a year, on the highest festival occasions.

Or he was—for there is no dynasty now in Siam, and Lingga had a great deal to do with this state of affairs.

But back there then in 1905 when the Court elephant died, Siam was appalled. Every resource of the rich treasury was thrown into a world-wide search for an albino pachyderm. Even a long-eared African elephant would do, provided he was near enough white. Any little eight-foot runt would do. Even a yellow-white one might do, if he could be bleached sufficiently for the Court occasions....

But Siam simply had to have its white elephant. And this period of years seemed to be one of those lacunae, when albinos simply did not exist.

Lingga had ranged deep. in the interior of Borneo. But now, fatefully enough, he came back to the northern coast. He exercised a perpetual grouch. He was really a rogue of rogues, the more fearsome because he just was attaining his full height and strength. He slept all day in a dark wallow, and roamed at night. When he ate it was his wasteful habit to uproot not only one tree, which would have been sufficient for even his giant appetite, but six or seven. And whenever he came upon a flimsy hut village in the jungle or on the river shore, he made it a point to barge straight through the hut stilts, bringing down to the ground to be trampled scores of screaming natives and Chinese, awakened from sleep to find themselves at the mercy of a dark monster who could see in the blackest night, who revelled in trampling them and bashing them to death.

ONCE a year, of course, Lingga ran amok—went musth with the denial of his mating instinct. Even decent elephants are bad at this time. Lingga was a fiend. He razed whatever lay in his path. Once, for instance, he crashed into the encampment of a party of white orchid hunters, crashed down the four tents, tossed cots and men twenty feet away, then trampled or gored all those who could not find cover immediately.

Again, the villagers at a big native settlement called Bintula, found the white monster's spoor on the river bank—and in the branches of a banyan nearby, the frightfully gored corpse of a white hunter named Fishel.

From that encounter with the white hunter, Lingga had acquired a permanent limp. One of the hunter's explosive bullets had struck him in the rump, and ranged down and inward to the hip. Unfortunately for the hunter, no bone had been smashed to flinders....

Then the first white man to see Lingga—and escape to tell—the tale came along. He was a mild, methodical little fat man, a Dutch botanist. He was chased by this mad elephant rogue, but managed to find a stout tree and scramble up like a monkey. Up there out of reach, the botanist sat and watched, blinking his watery blue eyes worriedly, while Lingga cursed and squealed his rage, and tried vainly to uproot a tree too substantial for even his vast strength.

The Dutch botanist had no particular interest in pachyderms, white or otherwise. But he did mark Lingga's exact height against the bole of the tree, then measured the distance from this mark to the ground, when finally the rogue elephant got disgusted and blundered away for easier prey.

In his own good time then, with his own long trip finished, the Dutch scientist sat on a veranda of his club in far distant Surabaya, drank quantities of stone crock gin mixed with quinine tonic, and told of his narrow escape from the giant white elephant.

He did not notice the electric silence which greeted his words. Methodically he plodded along in narrative, stating that the great albino pachyderm was "almost eight cubits in stature at the shoulders...."

Almost...

NO one paid any attention to the qualiﬁcation then. An English cubit—and an English big game hunter had been listening—is eighteen inches, one-half yard. The hunter got away quietly, and cabled word that a twelve foot white elephant was roaming the jungles of Sarawak. A renowned and reliable botanist vouched for the measurement. This would be a bigger than Jumbo!

No one thought of another difference, either. The Dutch use the Roman cubit which is only 17.47 inches in length. The Dutch scientist had been absolutely correct, if one read exactly what he said.

But no one did. Three yellow nations, and the emissaries of two white countries, immediately set forth expeditionary bands, to capture Lingga alive. And incidentally, as far as the yellow men were concerned, to ﬁght a bloodthirsty and terrible war with each other for the privilege of hunting the white beast in Sarawak.

Lingga himself was on the loose for two more whole years, ranging at night, sleeping days. The yellow men fought each other. Thousands died—six vessels transporting hunters being sunk in one savage sea battle.

The Orientals thought only of Lingga's whiteness. The British and American hunters wanted him because he was said to be bigger than Jumbo had been.

Then one day, right in the middle of all this hunting and strife, the unsuspecting Lingga appeared in quick succession to a pair of white officials of the Borneo Company, who described him wildly and excitedly—and in fourteen-foot terms—and then to a group of Chinese who were panning the meager gold sands of the Batang Lupar, near Marup.

That was the beginning of the end. They all knew within a dozen or so miles where he must be. Three expeditions of yellow men, each ﬁring sporadically at the two others, came into the region. Then all three tangled in a pitched battle which lasted ﬁve days and nights.

Meanwhile an Englishman named Stafford, employed by an American circus, gathered an army of native beaters, started through the swamps in the daytime, started the totally blind albino giant, drove him meekly enough into a pole keppah (corral), and captured him.

AS SOON as darkness fell Lingga saw what had happened, and tried to destroy the kappah and all the hated humans who had shackled him. But there were chains on each of his huge legs—and each chain was attached to tame elephant who was used to the business of subduing rogues. So that was that. Stafford and his men hustled Lingga away, out of reach of the embattled yellow armies.

"Then, however, the horrid truth emerged at once. Lingga was almost pure white, sure enough, but he was only eleven feet one inch tall! This was three inches shorter than Jumbo. So Lingga, to American circus eyes, was just another pachyderm, and worth much less than the effort and treasure expended upon getting him.

Stafford was shrewd. He knew how Siam, for one, felt about white elephants. So he hid Lingga in the last place anyone would look for a beast—in the belly of a broken down and abandoned cargo junk—while he bargained.

After two weeks of courtesies and secret searchings, the yellow men gave up—and made an offer. It was instantly accepted. Lingga was sold to Siam at a price said to have been two tons of pure silver, Lingga's weight.

At any rate, he was taken to the Siamese Court, amid the greatest country-wide rejoicing. There he was pampered in every conceivable way—given a harem of sleek wives, careful feeding, and semi-yearly adoration from the populace. They even supplied him with all the karene-bong (Indo-China mountain men) mahouts he needed. And he required a constant supply of these expert elephant handlers, since Lingga was given to bashing them, or drowning them in his scented bath.

Lingga died of a lung ailment in 1931. In that year revolution started in Siam, and the dynasty was overthrown.