Elephants like to read too

 It’s a little known fact that elephants – being gentle and refined creatures – thoroughly enjoy adventue stories and the odd poem or two, especially when they are composed just for them.

A case in point is Caligula. He was Baron Parzifal’s loyal pachyderm in Shadows and Pagodas, that zany Gothic adventure to find the lost treasure. We first met him in the Siamese port of Chanti Boon:

     “There you are, Peter!”

     “Good grief!” 

     Baron Parzifal was mounted on a huge elephant. The beast was led by a Siamese mahout and daubed in strange glyphs, and the howdah was a confusion of parasols, joss sticks and caskets. The Baron, wearing thick blue spectacles, was sitting on a tiger skin throne and cushions with a long curved horn of bronze – almost as tall as the baron himself – slung across the elephant’s shoulders and shining brilliantly in the sun. Vinkle was walking next to the mahout, swinging that incense of his much to the annoyance of the elephant – its trunk busied itself around Vinkle like a snake circling a mouse.

     “What on earth are you doing, Peter?” called down the Baron.

     “Er, buying a garland – souvenir.”

     “You’re not doing the Grand Tour, for Mendez’s sake! It’s bad enough with the men bartering away all their equipment for grog. Now get a move on, Peter. You need to start setting an example.”

     “What’s happened, sir?” said Peter, strapping on his shako.

     “It seems a large number of foreigners are heading this way,” said the Baron. “We can't take any chances and there's no time to lose. So it’s a short speech then we’re off to the Bamboo Mountains to fetch my treasure!”

     The Baron barked out an order in Siamese and the elephant turned and broke into a fast lumbering trot back towards the town with Peter, Vinkle and the mahout trotting alongside and the incense swinging wildly...

Later, as the expedition (and the Baron) unravel, Caligula is treated to poem after poem. All of them composed by the Baron and recited with tremendous and élan.

Almost as good as bananas.

By the way, it’s also a little known fact that the Baron’s poems may have inspired that master of the macabre Edgar Alan Poe. For example, certain similarities between the Baron’s Miss Lee and Annabel Lee have been picked through like the carcass of a sacrificed goat and hotly debated in Madam Sebbotenforff's occult bookshop on Paris. 

What Caligula thought about all this is not recorded.