Uncle Dick and Lisa's Old Time Animal Tales

M. Hugo de Koppenfels writes from Eloby, Gorisco Bay, a little colony, that he has been exploring the country during several weeks of pouring rain. He ascended the Muni, the Noya, the Balinji and the Tumbini to the first falls. In the Crystal Mountains he fell in with tribes absolutely unknown to the present, or who at least had not been seen by whites, with rare exceptions-the Etemo, the Manga, the Otonto and the Toko. These people are scattered in the middle of the Fans or Pahonins and Osszeba, but speak languages different from those of the two latter.
They are obliged to give up planting on account of the ravages of elephants and gorillas which are very numerous and daring. Not a single night passed, M. de Koppenfels states, that he did not hear these animals ravaging around the villages, which are, for the most part, very large. As soon as the animals are known to be near, the whole village is out on foot endeavoring to frighten them away by shouting.
In these nocturnal expeditions, in which the explorer took part, he noticed that the head man of the village addressed a speech to the elephants, and that in this speech his own name was pronounced. He was told that the elephants were threatened to be handed over to him, and that if they did not fly at once they would be visited on the morrow and the white man would kill them. If the elephant seizes a plant with his trunk, the people immediately raise a dreadful, plaintive howling, and the principal orator address, in a lamentable voice, supplications to the enormous brute.