There is a legend that elephant dispose of their dead in secret burial grounds and that none of them has ever been discovered.
— Beryl Markham in West with the Night
A thin layer of clouds crept over the sun, and I cursed my luck. It was just before the golden hour, and the light, instead of turning a brilliant gold, had turned watery and hellish. But then, as the wind turned, and a stench of rotten flesh hit my nose, I looked around and saw this tree full of vultures. What a moody and atmospheric shot this was, I thought, perhaps just right for the cover of a book on the Mongol invasion of the world, or perhaps the Black Death. But what we saw, as Stephen turned the Landrover upwind towards the source of the stench, was something totally unexpected.
The story of Tarzan of the Apes involves an elephant graveyard and its treasure of ivory. We know today that stories of elephant graveyards were just myths. But even the scale of a single dead elephant boggles the mind if you ever come across it. Every species of scavenging bird we’d seen in the Mara triangle seemed to be here in large numbers. As we watched a large white-backed vulture emerged from under the skin of the cadaver. It was clear that we had arrived very late. The mammal scavengers had already come and gone. The stench told us that bacteria had started breaking down the flesh. After the birds, insects would arrive to clear the little that remained. The elephant had almost completed the cycle of nature, returning its flesh to the rest of the ecosystem.