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

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All four were safely lodged in the Zoological Gardens on May 24, 1836, an event which the Council of the Society justly claimed as highly creditable to its resources. One died in the following winter, but the rest continued in excellent health, and became the greatest public favourites in the menagerie.

At the time of their arrival the largest was then about 11 ft. high, the height of an adult male being 12 ft. at the shoulder and 18 ft. at the head. For many years, as we have said, the giraffes throve and multiplied. They readily took to European food, and ate hay and fresh grass from the tall racks with which their stables were fitted. Onions and sugar were their favourite delicacies, and in search of sugar they would follow their keeper, and slip their long prehensile tongues into his hands or pockets. But they always retained a liking for eating flowers, a reminiscence, perhaps, of the days when their parents feasted on mimosa blossoms in the desert. Some years ago, one was seen to stretch its neck over the railings, and to delicately nip off an artificial rose in a young lady’s hat. They were most affectionate creatures, and, as M. Thibaut noticed when in charge of them in Upper Egypt, would shed tears if they missed their companions or their usual attendants. But the development of the lachrymal ducts, which enables the giraffe to express its emotions in this very human fashion, is less obvious than the wonderful size and beauty of the eyes themselves, which are far larger than those of any other quadruped. On May 27, 1840, four years after their arrival, the female giraffe bore and afterwards reared a fine fawn, and it was not until they had been eleven years in the menagerie that the death occurred of one of the pair of males which had survived the first year in England. In 1849 two more males and one female giraffe were waiting the Society’s pleasure at Cairo, and the stock continued to increase by births in the menagerie. In 1867 the straw in the giraffes’ house caught fire at night, and a female and her fawn were suffocated. A sum of £545 was claimed as compensation for their loss, and duly paid to the Society by the “Sun” Fire Insurance Office, probably the first claim of the kind paid in Europe. For curiosity, now that we have no living giraffe left in England, we would suggest a comparison of the beautifully-stuffed giraffe heads in Mr. Rowland Ward’s collection in Piccadilly, with the innumerable specimens of other large game, such as wapiti, buffaloes, hippopotami, or rhinoceros, which fill the rooms. In all these, the size and character of the eye has been carefully reproduced, though no art could preserve the lustre and softness of the eye of the giraffe in life. While the Mahdi’s power remains unbroken at Khartoum, there is little probability that the Soudan traders will be able to supply any to occupy the empty house in Regent’s Park. Yet the southern range of these beautiful creatures, though it has greatly receded, still extends to the North Kalahari Desert, and to part of Khama’s country, where the “camel-thorn,” as the Boers call the giraffe-acacia, abounds. There the great chief carefully preserves the giraffes, and allows only his own people, or his own white friends, to kill them. The other point at which the giraffe country is still accessible to European hunters or naturalists is Somaliland, and the “unknown horn” of Africa. This district is so far accessible, that parties of English sportsmen yearly penetrate it from Berbera, making Aden their starting-point from British territory. But from the point of view of those who would delay as long as possible the extermination of the large game of Africa, the Dervish empire is not altogether matter for regret. No doubt the Arabs will still kill giraffes to make their shields from the hides, as they have done for centuries; but for the present the Soudan giraffes will be protected from raids like that in which those in the Kalahari Desert were destroyed in hundreds, because the price of “sjambok whips” had doubled. The Mahdi is, in fact, the involuntary protector of the wild animals of Central Africa, to which Sir Samuel Baker bore unconscious testimony when he lamented that, “owing to British interference in Egypt, where the ‘courbatch’ (hippopotamus whip) has been abolished, the hippopotamus will remain undisturbed on the great White Nile, monarch of the river upon which fifteen British steamers were flying when the Soudan was abandoned by the despotic order of Great Britain, and handed back to savagedom and wild beasts.”