Читать книгу Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent's Park Gardens онлайн

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The Last Giraffe. From a photograph by Gambier Bolton.

The time of their death, unfortunately, coincided with the complete interruption of the ancient trade in wild animals up the Valley of the Nile by the Mahdi’s occupation of the Soudan, a trade as old as the days of Solomon, never organized, often interrupted for centuries, yet always ready to spring up again, and always dependent for its rarest products on the free navigation of the river of Egypt. Giraffes—which, not excepting the hippopotamus, have most excited the imagination of European capitals after the long intervals in which they have remained unseen by the nations of the West—seem always to have found their way hither from the land of the Pharaohs. The first seen in Europe since the “tertiary epoch” was obtained from Alexandria by Julius Cæsar, and exhibited at the Circensian Games to crowds who expected, from its name, “camelopard,” to find in it a combination of the size of a camel and the ferocity of a panther. Pliny, who described it, echoed the public disappointment. “It was as quiet,” he wrote, “as a sheep.” The trade probably reached its maximum after it became the fashion to exhibit combats of wild beasts at Rome; yet even then giraffes seem to have been scarce in the popular shows, though Pompey could exhibit five hundred lions at a time, and the Emperor Titus, at the dedication of his new theatre, caused the slaughter of five thousand wild beasts. Either the number of wild animals in the provinces must have been beyond anything since known, or the Roman Governors must have used their despotic powers freely to oblige their friends. No doubt they did this. Cælius, Cicero’s gossiping correspondent, says, when writing to him in Cilicia—“In nearly every letter I have written to you about panthers. It is a great shame. Pray send to Pamphylia, where most are said to be taken. You have only to give an order, and the thing is done. You know I hate trouble, while you like it, and yet you will not do this, which is no trouble. I have sent men to look after them and bring them here.”