Robert Standish

Elephant Walk Robert Standish

The Elephant People will not like it! That's what a native prophesied gloomily when George Carey's father built the great teak mansion across the elephant trail ? a symbol of affluence and power throughout Ceylon. Standing in several thousand acres of growing tea, it boasted twenty-eight bedrooms, a concert grand piano, exquisite crystal, linen and china. A fierce pride filled the breast of the servant Appuhamy whenever he thought about the mansion and the master he adored. The master ? bluff, hearty George Carey ? married in middle age a wife younger than he. He courted her in England and took her to Paris for a honeymoon where he bought her expensive gifts from the Rue de la Paix. She came home with him to Ratnagalla riding in jodhpurs. ?She wears trousers?, said Appuhamy softly. Talk buzzed in a thousand soft-tongued Asiatic voices. Carey's modern young wife looked about her at tropical dissipation, luxury and waste. When she tried to make changes, Appuhamy closed his lips in stubborn disapproval. And when the lonely young woman was driven to friendship with Wilding - a lean, handsome sensualist - Appuhamy seethed with rage. He even tried a subtle but powerful Oriental stratagem: he bought the luscious, golden-skinned Rayna to tempt Wilding. In this tense story of human passions, and of the white man's war against the alien Tropics - which, like the Elephant People, ask no quarter and give none - there are the sure ingredients of drama. You will follow breathlessly as the match touches them off. ROBERT STANDISH has been a tea planter in Ceylon; a rubber planter in Malaya; a boundary rider on an Australian sheep station; a coal trimmer at sea; a journalist in Japan, China, Java, Siberia, and North Africa. He has also lived in France and in the West Indies. J. O. P. Bland, one of the greatest living authorities on China and the Far East, has said that two of Standish's former novels, The Small General and The Three Bamboos, "contain more knowledge of the East than all the Blue Books and White Papers put together".