Elephant dance (1937)

Except for the new cloths of the famous weavers of Melkote Melkote, there seems to be nothing in all the village of sacred temples and sacred tanks that is less than five centuries old. When we came with our long train of elephants they told us that Tipu Sultan, a hundred and fifty years ago, had promised them that no elephant We break a should ever again come to Melkote. Now we had Promise broken that promise. So we paid the temple priest ten rupees (fifteen shillings). Also the people thought we were going to sacrifice a man to an elephant. But they are sweet people and have given us a romantic bathing place, one of their own sacred tanks, to bathe in. But we were no sooner settled in Melkote than the Little rain came down; this time the little monsoon — a sort Monsoon of afterthought ! We amused ourselves through the drizzling days riding on our elephants through the scrub bush high on the hills, looking for pig and panther. The rain curtains over the plains were lovely. Sudden shafts of sunlight would shoot down through the rolling black clouds and spotlight patches of shining green plain. Down on that rolling plain beneath us was another sport — black buck. We might not shoot them for they were protected. But I longed to go out and see them. And one morning we did. 79