Giraffe Reflections. Dale Peterson

utmost benevolence so that he illuminates the darkest places, then a ch’i-lin appears. This shows that Your Majesty’s virtue equals that of Heaven; its merciful blessings have spread far and wide so that its harmonious vapours have emanated a ch’i-lin, as an endless bliss to the state for a myriad myriad years.¹⁴

      Shen Tu declared himself a lowly servant of the emperor and, as such, wished to join the admiring throng. Beholding such an omen of good fortune as the ch’i-lin, he humbly lowered himself one hundred times while knocking his head to the ground in order to present an honorific hymn concerning the glories of the emperor and the unicorn, this “manifestation of the divine spirit,” this very ch’i-lin.

      This grand ch’i-lin who, combining a deer’s body and the tail of an ox, stands fifteen feet tall, possesses a “fleshy boneless horn,” and is colored “with luminous spots like a red cloud or a purple mist.”

      This gentle ch’i-lin who, anxiously examining the ground he walks on, is careful to avoid stepping on any living creature.

      This harmonious ch’i-lin who, walking in such a stately manner, “observes a rhythm” for each movement he makes, while producing, with his “harmonious voice,” the pleasing sounds of a bell or a “musical tube.”

      This glorious and benevolent ch’i-lin who, with his wondrous presence, magnifies the glories and benevolence of the Son of Heaven himself: “the Sacred Emperor who excels both in literary and military virtues,” the one “who has succeeded to the Precious Throne and has accomplished Perfect Order and imitated the Ancients!”¹⁵

      

      This chapter tells of the Chinese oceanic expeditions in the fifteenth century and the giraffes brought back and presented to the Ming emperor Yongle as “unicorns,” based on an ancient Confucian tradition describing the unicorn as one of four magical animals. How could anyone mistake a giraffe for a unicorn?

      The set below opens with photographs showing giraffe middle (median) horns: important if you’re going to be mistaken for a magical unicorn. Also important was the fact that Confucian legend described the unicorn’s horn as being covered with skin or hair, as are the horns of giraffes. Finally, Confucian legend stressed that the unicorn was a remarkably serene and gentle animal, blessed by nature or providence. These photographs suggest some of the steady grace and quiet gentleness of giraffes.

      The Chinese seem to have brought home reticulated giraffes from East Africa. This set of photos likewise concentrates entirely on individuals of the reticulated group in the Samburu National Reserve, Kenya. Some of these giraffes have extra bony protuberances, or “horns,” behind their ears and elsewhere.

      ZARAFAS

      FOLLOWING THE GREEK AND ROMAN HABIT, Arabic authors of the Middle Ages continued to identify giraffes as camelopards, but Arabic speakers began applying a word that sounded like zurafa or zarafa. The word, according to one early commentator, came from a linguistic root meaning “assembly,” in reference to the idea that this animal was an assemblage of parts of different animals. Another Arabic scholar insisted that it derived from the Ethiopian zarat, meaning “thin” or “slender.”¹

      Rome and the classical world had depended on Egypt as the sole gateway to deeper Africa and thus the sole source of giraffes, but after the disintegration of the Roman Empire in AD 476 and the subsequent expansion of Islamic civilizations that would finally control three-quarters of the Mediterranean, these animals were typically destined to become the private property of Islamic nabobs in the Middle East, who may have had occasion to speak among themselves about the rare, strangely formed, and remarkably gentle animals called zarafas.

      The giraffes arrived, as before, from lands along the Nile to the south of Egypt—a part of Africa the Romans called Nubia, which included what the Ptolemies knew as the kingdom of Meroë. The Nubians, like the earlier Meroites, were occasionally acquiring live giraffes in trade with hunters and dealers from farther south. But the movement of giraffes into Egypt became more routine by 652, after Islamic forces took over Egypt and the emir Sa’d Ibn Abi Sarh proceeded to conquer Nubia. The emir settled on a treaty with Nubia that required the annual tribute of four hundred slaves, numerous camels, a pair of elephants, and a pair of giraffes. Later on the extortion was moderated so that the Nubians were sending three hundred slaves and a single giraffe annually. But the same steady traffic—in captive humans and animals—moving from sub-Saharan Africa through Nubia and into Egypt would continue for more than two centuries.²

      Islamic cultures had by then created a powerful monopoly on most trade out of the northern end of Africa. Christian Europeans were excluded from participating in the profitable trans-Saharan traffic in gold and slaves, for instance; and, because the Nile River trade was likewise limited and blocked, Europeans were also kept from trading in—and ultimately kept ignorant about—giraffes.

      By the time Saint Isidore, Bishop of Seville (560 to 636), was writing his De Natura Rerum, camelopards were obscure enough in the West that he accidentally combined them with chameleons, thereby producing a beastie he dubbed chameleonpardus, which resembled a cross between a camel and a lion—with a leopard’s white spots, a horse’s neck, the feet of an ox, and a coat that “changes to the colours which it sees by a very easy conversion.”³