quote:

I am sure that some quick research on the internet would reveal their exact location.

quote:

Originally posted by Eland Slayer:
I do know that they weighed 237 & 226 lbs. and that they were 11 feet long!!! Could you imagine what they looked like on the bull when he was alive?

quote:

Back in 1983 or 1984, while I was researching something quite different
about Africa, I came across a mention of an animal known only as the
Kilimanjaro Elephant. It was an evocative name that seemed to have a
mythic quality to it, so I began finding out what I could about this
elephant -- and what I found fascinated me.

In the Roland Ward Book of Big Game Records, the top 200 trophy animals
of every African species are listed. Usually the difference between the
Number One and Number Twenty animal is half an inch, or a quarter of a
pound. Not so with the Kilimanjaro Elephant: his tusks weighed 237 and
225 pounds, and no other tusk in history ever went over 190 pounds. He
was a monster among his own kind.

There was more, too -- or, rather, curiously less. With almost every
other animal in the book, they know the date it was killed, who shot
it, what kind of bullet was used, where it was shot, who the guide or
white hunter was, what the animal's measurements were. Not so the
Kilimanjaro Elephant: they think, but do not know, that he was killed
on the northern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro; they suspect, but do not
know, that he was killed in 1898; they surmise, but do not know, that
he was killed by an escaped slave. And that constitutes everything that
is known about him.

Well, everything prior to his death, anyway. His ivory turned up for
auction at Zanzinbar in 1898. One tusk, the larger one, was bought by
an American, who was to pick it up at Cairo. It was shipped north with
a slave caravan, but the caravan was raided, and the tusk disappeared
for 12 years, finally turning up in Brussels. The other tusk went to
Belgium, then India, and ultimately England. Finally the British Museum
of Natural History bought the pair of them in 1932, and after an
attempt was made to steal them in 1937, they were taken off exhibit and
stored away in a vault beneath the museum, where they still reside. I
wrote to the curator for permission to examine them, and finally got to
see them in May of 1985. They are magnificent, each going more than
ten feet long and two feet in circumference at the base.

I began tracing every reference I could find in my voluminous African
collection, and finally plotted out a mainstream novel, which would
follow the Kilimanjaro Elephant for the last month of his life, and
then follow the ivory on an entirely fictitious journey until it wound
up in the British Museum.