A Day's Elephant Hunting in Essex. 31
hoed potatoes. Thus we reach the brink of one of the pits.
Here, still accompanied by the ladies of our party, we begin
to descend to the realms below. We reach the lower terra
firma by a course of wheelbarrow planks. At length we
are all assembled, first to receive instructions from our
guides, and then to unearth what game we can for our-
selves. It now begins to dawn on the minds of the unini-
tiated of our party that elephant hunting in Essex, in
these modern days, is an underground sport—a recreation
restricted to the subterranean world and no longer carried
on in the open.
We have now descended from the upper air into the ex-
cavated bed of some ancient river or lake. It might be
misleading, as will hereafter appear, if we said we were
standing in the bed of the ancient Thames. And yet these
alluvial precincts of the Roding certainly lie within the great
shallow trough of what we now call the Thames Valley—
that old, incalculably old, line of drainage which has seen
so many and eventful changes in the physical geography of
south-eastern England. Enough for the present that this
excavation is the inlet to the zoological world beneath.
But let us be sceptical and take nothing for granted. We
are determined to sift to the bottom the strange stories
told of these Ilford pits. If we are really standing in an
old river-bed, we may demand to see some trace of the
various organic remains which a river is always depositing
with its sediment. We know that the Thames of to-day
is always embedding in its mud some specimens of the
aquatic or terrestrial life of the period—the shell-fish that
live and die in its waters, and the land animals that are
constantly, by accident or design, borne down in the
stream. As in some future deserted bed of the Thames,
milleniums hence, the fauna of to-day may be disembedded
by the Saturday afternoon naturalists of the period, so we,
in this Ilford excursion, should expect to discover in the
earth around us some relics of the ancient Thames Valley,
deposited milleniums ago.
This then is what we see as we stand down below in the
pit looking up to the daylight. A perpendicular face of the