ELEPHANT

YOU go down shade to the river, where naked men sit on
   flat brown rocks, to watch the ferry, in the sun;
And you cross the ferry with the naked people, go up the
   tropical lane
Through the palm-trees and past hollow paddy-fields where
   naked men are threshing rice
And the monolithic water-buffaloes, like old, muddy stones
   with hair on them, are being idle;
And through the shadow of bread-fruit trees, with their dark
   green, glossy, fanged leaves
Very handsome, and some pure yellow fanged leaves;
Out into the open, where the path runs on the top of a dyke
   between paddy-fields:
And there, of course, you meet a huge and mud-grey
   elephant advancing his frontal bone, his trunk curled
   round a log of wood:
So you step down the bank, to make way.

Shuffle, shuffle, and his little wicked eye has seen you as he
   advances above you,
The slow beast curiously spreading his round feet for the
   dust.
And the slim naked man slips down, and the beast deposits
   the lump of wood, carefully.
The keeper hooks the vast knee, the creature salaams.

White man, you are saluted.
Pay a few cents.

But the best is the Pera-hera, at midnight, under the tropical
   stars,
With a pale little wisp of a Prince of Wales, diffident, up in
   a small pagoda on the temple side
And white people in evening dress buzzing and crowding the
   stand upon the grass below and opposite:
And at last the Pera-hera procession, flambeaux aloft in the
   tropical night, of blazing cocoa-nut,
Naked dark men beneath,
And the huge frontal of three great elephants stepping forth
   to the tom-tom’s beat, in the torch-light,
Slowly sailing in gorgeous apparel through the flame-light,
   in front of a towering, grimacing white image of wood.

The elephant bells striking slow, tong-tong, tong-tong,
To music and queer chanting
Enormous shadow-processions filing on in the flare of fire
In the fume of cocoa-nut oil, in the sweating tropical night,
In the noise of the tom-toms and singers;
Elephants after elephants curl their trunks, vast shadows,
   and some cry out
As they approach and salaam, under the dripping fire of the
   torches
That pale fragment of a Prince up there, whose motto is
  Ich dien.

Pale, dispirited Prince, with his chin on his hands, his nerves
   tired out,
Watching and hardly seeing the trunk-curl approach and
   clumsy, knee-lifting salaam
Of the hugest, oldest of beasts in the night and the fire-flare
   below.

He is royalty, pale and dejected fragment up aloft.
And down below huge homage of shadowy beasts; bare —
   foot and trunk-lipped in the night.

Chieftains, three of them abreast, on foot
Strut like peg-tops, wound around with hundreds of yards
   of fine linen.
They glimmer with tissue of gold, and golden threads on a
   jacket of velvet,
And their faces are dark, and fat, and important.

They are royalty, dark-faced royalty, showing the conscious
   whites of their eyes
And stepping in homage, stubborn, to that nervous pale lad
   up there.

More elephants, tong, tong-tong, loom up,
Huge, more tassels swinging, more dripping fire of new
   cocoa-nut cressets
High, high flambeaux, smoking of the east;
And scarlet hot embers of torches knocked out of the sockets
   among bare feet of elephants and men on the path in
   the dark.
And devil dancers luminous with sweat, dancing on to the
   shudder of drums.
Tom-toms, weird music of the devil, voices of men from the
   jungle singing;
Endless, under the Prince.

Towards the tail of the everlasting procession
In the long hot night, mere dancers from insignificant
   villages,
And smaller, more frightened elephants.

Men-peasants from jungle villages dancing and running with
   sweat and laughing,
Naked dark men with ornaments on, on their naked arms
   and their naked breasts, the grooved loins
Gleaming like metal with running sweat as they suddenly
   turn, feet apart,
And dance, and dance, forever dance, with breath half
   sobbing in dark, sweat-shining breasts,
And lustrous great tropical eyes unveiled now, gleaming a
   kind of laugh,
A naked, gleaming dark laugh, like a secret out in the dark,
And flare of a tropical energy, tireless, afire in the dark, slim
   limbs and breasts,
Perpetual, fire-laughing motion, among the slow shuffle
Of elephants.
The hot dark blood of itself a-laughing, wet, half-devilish,
   men all motion
Approaching under that small pavilion, and tropical eyes
   dilated look up
Inevitably look up
To the Prince
To that tired remnant of royalty up there
Whose motto is Ich dien.

As if the homage of the kindled blood of the east
Went up in wavelets to him, from the breasts and eyes of
   jungle torch-men,
And he couldn’t take it.

What would they do, those jungle men running with sweat,
   with the strange dark laugh in their eyes, glancing up,
And the sparse-haired elephants slowly following,
If they knew that his motto was Ich dien?
And that he meant it.

They begin to understand
The rickshaw boys begin to understand
And then the devil comes into their faces,
But a different sort, a cold, rebellious, jeering devil.

In elephants and the east are two devils, in all men maybe.
The mystery of the dark mountain of blood, reeking in
   homage, in lust, in rage,
And passive with everlasting patience,
Then the little, cunning pig-devil of the elephant’s lurking
   eyes, the unbeliever.

We dodged, when the Pera-hera was finished, under the
   hanging, hairy pigs’ tails
And the flat, flaccid mountains of the elephants’ standing
   haunches,
Vast-blooded beasts,
Myself so little dodging rather scared against the eternal
   wrinkled pillars of their legs, as they were being dis —
   mantled;
Then I knew they were dejected, having come to hear the
   repeated
Royal summons: Dien! Ihr!
Serve!
Serve, vast mountainous blood, in submission and splendour, serve
   royalty.
Instead of which, the silent, fatal emission from that pale,
   shattered boy up there:
Ich dien.

That’s why the night fell in frustration.
That’s why, as the elephants ponderously, with unseeming
   swiftness, galloped uphill in the night, going back to
   the jungle villages,
As the elephant bells sounded tong-tong-tong, bell of the
   temple of blood in the night, swift-striking,
And the crowd like a field of rice in the dark gave way like
   liquid to the dark
Looming gallop of the beasts,
It was as if the great bare bulks of elephants in the obscure
   light went over the hill-brow swiftly, with their tails
   between their legs, in haste to get away,
Their bells sounding frustrate and sinister.

And all the dark-faced, cotton-wrapped people, more
   numerous and whispering than grains of rice in a rice —
   field at night,
All the dark-faced, cotton-wrapped people, a countless host
   on the shores of the lake, like thick wild rice by the
   water’s edge,
Waiting for the fireworks of the after-show,
As the rockets went up, and the glare passed over countless
   faces, dark as black rice growing,
Showing a glint of teeth, and glancing tropical eyes aroused
   in the night,
There was the faintest twist of mockery in every face, across
   the hiss of wonders as the rocket burst
High, high up, in flakes, shimmering flakes of blue fire,
   above the palm-trees of the islet in the lake,
O faces upturned to the glare, O tropical wonder, wonder,
   a miracle in heaven!
And the shadow of a jeer, of underneath disappointment, as
   the rocket-coruscation died, and shadow was the same
   as before.

They were foiled, the myriad whispering dark-faced cotton —
   wrapped people.
They had come to see royalty,
To bow before royalty, in the land of elephants, bow deep,
   bow deep.
Bow deep, for it’s good as a draught of cool water to bow
   very, very low to the royal.

And all there was to bow to, a weary, diffident boy whose
   motto is Ich dien.
I serve! I serve! in all the weary iron of his mien — ‘Tis I who
   serve!
Drudge to the public.

I wish they had given the three feathers to me;
That I had been he in the pavilion, as in a pepper-box aloft
   and alone
To stand and hold feathers, three feathers above the world,
And say to them: Dien! Ihr! Dient!
Omnes, vos omnes, servite.
Serve me, I am meet to be served.
Being royal of the gods.

And to the elephants:
First great beasts of the earth
A prince has come back to you,
Blood-mountains.
Crook the knee and be glad.

                              Kandy.