herei]."[2]

[Footnote 1: A corral was organised near Putlam in 1846, by Mr. Morris,
the chief officer of the district. It was constructed across one of the
paths which the elephants frequent in their frequent marches, and during
the course of the proceedings two of the captured elephants died. Their
carcases were left of course within the enclosure, which was abandoned
as soon as the capture was complete. The wild elephants resumed their
path through it, and a few days afterwards the headman reported to Mr.
Morris that the bodies had been removed and carried outside the corral
to a spot to which nothing but the elephants could have borne them.]

[Footnote 2: PHILE, _Expositio de Eleph._ l. 243.]

The Singhalese have a further superstition in relation to the close of
life in the elephant: they believe that, on feeling the approach of
dissolution, he repairs to a solitary valley, and there resigns himself
to death. A native who accompanied Mr. Cripps, when hunting, in the
forests of Anarajapoora, intimated to him that he was then in the
immediate vicinity of the spot "_to which the elephants come to die_,"
but that it was so mysteriously concealed, that although every one
believed in its existence, no one had ever succeeded in penetrating to
it. At the corral which I have described at Kornegalle, in 1847,
Dehigame, one of the Kandyan chiefs, assured me it was the universal
belief of his countrymen, that the elephants, when about to die,
resorted to a valley in Saffragam, among the mountains to the east of
Adam's Peak, which was reached by a narrow pass with walls of rock on
either side, and that there, by the side of a lake of clear water, they
took their last repose.[1] It was not without interest that I afterwards
recognised this tradition in the story of _Sinbad of the Sea_, who in
his Seventh Voyage, after conveying the presents of Haroun al Raschid to
the king of Serendib, is wrecked on his return from Ceylon, and sold as
a slave to a master who employs him in shooting elephants for the sake
of their ivory; till one day the tree on which he was stationed having
been uprooted by one of the herd, he fell senseless to the ground, and
the great elephant approaching wound his trunk around him and carried
him away, ceasing not to proceed, until he had taken him to a place
where, his terror having subsided, _he found himself amongst the bones
of elephants, and knew that this was their burial place_.[2] It is
curious to f