Rats had gnawed some of it, to get at the soft sweet core.
But the men who keep the keys of the bursting ivory vaults by London docks could tell how much of it was good, and what huge stores of it reached them.

For some strange reason they are not a very talkative breed of men.
We did not haul the ivory out ourselves.

That would have been too public a proceeding.

But any one who attempted during the years that followed nineteen hundred to make a trip to Elgon can truthfully inform whoever cares to know, how jealously and wakefully the Protectorate Government guarded those lonely trails.

And there are folk who saw the hundred-man safaris that came down from that way every week or so, carrying old ivory, said to be acquired in the way of trade.