Dum Dee Dum... I am not a super hero neither am i spiderman. I am going to save the world... like as if you would believe. I am a maniac. I came from an outer space which is filled with water. I learn swimming at the age of zero.I wail like a cry baby. I crawl like spiderman, i fly like superman, i drive like batman. I live in wonderland. Rugrats is my friend, so is peter pan.
For some reason this book "Elephant Walk" by Robert Standish suddenly occurred to me.
I read it a long time ago when I was a single-digit age.
Wikipedia it and you will find that there has been a movie of the same name made about it.
In my recollection, Ruth has a baby, and in the middle of the night she can hear the wail of the old elephant, who has lost his status as an alpha male and is too injured by the battle to do anything other than go to the cooling mud and water area he frequented in his youth, to lie there and die.
However, the plantation blocks his path. The white settlers have not had the decency to at least leave a path through which migrating elephants may travel. The elephants may no longer go to their seasonal watering hole; they have to find another one. The old elephant can no longer do such things, so he is succeeded by the alpha male, who fights him to the death.
In my memory, Ruth feels for the elephant but her arrogant husband doesn't give a damn.
A side plot of the story is about this girl called Randy, one of the indigenous people of Ceylon (which we now know as Sri Lanka). She comes from a tribe of people where they go naked from the waist up: they have never known any shirts or dresses or clothes except for what covers them from the waist down. I think Wiley brings Ruth to choose a governess for their baby from amongst the tribeswomen near them and she chose this young girl called Randy, who has nice long black hair.
Randy looks after their baby and falls in love with Wiley. I am not sure whether they had an affair or no, but when she hears Wiley confess to Ruth that he loves her, she is angry. In one scene, she tears her long nails down Wiley's cheek.
Her anger knows no bounds. Today, I know to use the quote: "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned". When Ruth is bitten by a snake, Randy refuses to tell Wiley what type of snake it was. Apparently if the wrong antidote is used, the victim will die because of the way it makes your heartbeat go: either too fast or too slow.
Ruth lives, but I forgot what happened to Randy.
In a final bid to reach his final resting place, the old elephant tears up the road leading to the plantation and does not stop, not even when they shoot bullets at him. He goes on a rampage and the plantation eventually burns down.
I don't recall if Ruth ever had an affair with the gardener, or whether Wiley's affair with Randy was just in Randy's mind.
Too young I guess. It's time to command a re-read, since the 1930s period was already verging on the hippie period and would have hints of sexual tension etc that we so love to read into gothic works.
