Page 107 - The Book of Rumi

participated in the slaughter or touched a morsel of the flesh decided to stay
awake and guard their camp, instinctively feeling that the wise man had not
warned them without good reason.
Meanwhile, the mother elephant had been searching everywhere for her
young one, growing more furious and exasperated by the minute. Sniffi ng
everything with her long, sturdy trunk, she eventually detected her offspring’s
scent in the near distance and quickened her step. In a wink of an eye, she
was upon the felons’ camp. She approached the one man who was awake and
sniffed him from head to toe, especially around his mouth, to see if she could
detect the scent of her baby. The man was immobile, tongue-tied with fright.
She circled him three times to make sure she had not made a mistake and then
passed him by without harming him, quickly going to the other men sleeping
a little farther away.
She sniffed the fi rst man’s mouth and immediately smelled her baby, then
crushed him under her forelegs, the size of stone pillars, and threw him up
in the air with her mighty trunk, breaking virtually every bone in his body.
Then she approached the others who had feasted on her child, and, one by
one, subjected them to the same excruciating treatment without showing the
least sign of remorse.
When the last guilty man had been slaughtered, the mother elephant
returned to the man who had refrained from eating her offspring. She gra-
ciously knelt down before him and in one quick swoop lifted him with her
trunk onto her back and gallantly carried him to his fi nal destination.

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