Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 June 1885 — “Old Injin Rubber.” [ARTICLE]

“Old Injin Rubber.”

The author of “Up and Down the Irrawaddy” relates the following incident of his visit, on an elephant’s back, to the Caves of Gautama, and an encounter with a huge boa constrictor: “Shorlv after emerging from the jungle, our liveliest curiosity was aroused by the eccentric movements of our elephant, and the sudden excitement of his mahout, or driver. The man was leaning over the head of his beast, exploring the ground before him on each side with anxious scrutiny, talking all the while to the elephant, in quick, sharp ejaculations, sometimes shrill, sometimes subdued, sometimes almost whispered in his ear. “ ‘Old Injin Rubber’—the name of our elephant—crept forward cautiously (imagine an elephant on tip-toe), hesitating, suspicious,- vigilant, defensive, holding his precious trunk high in the air. Presently he stopped short, stared before him in evident agitation, for I felt the mass of flesh vibrating beneath mess when a heavy-laden wagon crosses a suspension bridge. “Suddenly, with trumpet pointed to the sky, he blew a sharp, brazen bifist, and trotted forward. At the same moment an exultant exclamation from the mahout told the story in a - word: “ ‘The boa! the boa!’ “Bight in the path, where the sun was hottest, lay a serpent, his vast length of splendid ugliness gorged, torpid and motionless—not coiled, but outstretched, prostrate and limp—abject under the weight of his own gluttony. The boa-constrictor had just dined. “ ‘Old Injin Rubber’ paused, as if for instructions; he received them from the mahout’s boat-hook on the back of his skull. Half a dozen more rolls and lurches, and he planted his huge forefoot on the drunken dragon’s head. The monster wriggled and squirmed, now twisting his great girth in seemingly everlasting knots; now erecting all his length, without a kink, in the air; now thrashing the ground with resounding stripes, till at last, beaten out, his strength all spent, even his tail subdued, he lay dead. Then again and again the elephant tossed the serpent’s dying bulk indignantly in the air, and dashed it to the earth. ”*