The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux

Author:Paul Theroux [Theroux, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-8522-2
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2013-05-21T07:00:00+00:00

On his return to Abu, Nathan Jamieson began working again with his elephant, Sukiri. A few days after he’d arrived back, he left her untethered, and when he walked a little distance to fetch her chains and manacles, turning his back on her, she followed him in the nodding and plodding way of an elephant on a mission, and knocked him flat, crushing him to death with her huge head. Nathan was thirty-two years old.

There was a further shock. When his identical twin brother Heath showed up at the camp to take Nathan’s body away, the whole African staff stared in fascinated horror and then abject fear, scared rigid by the sight of what appeared to be an incarnation of Nathan, claiming his ghost.

Later, Michael told me, “He died doing what he loved.” I remembered how happy Nathan had been at Abu Camp, how fond he was of the elephants, how much he knew of them. Perhaps it was true that he’d had a happy death.

On hearing of Nathan’s death, the Botswana government ordered that Sukiri be destroyed. Michael Lorentz vigorously opposed this, and thus began an imbroglio that ended with Michael quitting Abu for good, the camp resuming business under new management. Sukiri and the two elephants that had been orphaned with her were trucked to Johannesburg and flown in elephantine crates to the United States, where they are now housed together in a cage at the Pittsburgh Zoo.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.