Elephantine miracle

摘要

Eritrea's elephants had been missing presumed lost for more than 40 years. Their rediscovery, in healthy numbers in the far south-west of the country, heralds a new era for East Africa's most northerly population. Hezy Shoshani remembers Christmas 2001 with extraordinary clarity. The day dawned warm, dry and windless. The sky was blue. Before long, the temperature had soared to 33 deg C in the shade. From the hill where he had taken up position, there was an almost perfect view - of the dried-out sandy bed of the Gash River, of the palm trees dotting the floodplains on either side and, finally, obscured by palm leaves, of the top half of a browsing elephant. One of his students, not noted for her expressiveness, flashed him a huge grin when she spotted it. "For a few min?utes we were all transfixed," he recalls. "Then I came to, thinking: this is for real, this is not a dream."