Rudyard Kipling, author and poet, is one of the most interesting and significant literary figures of the late 19th and early 20th-centuries. He was not English but, in terms of the time, Anglo-Indian, being born in Bombay to English parents. His use of the short story form, always technically sophisticated, showed sustained formal innovation during the 1900s. Kipling’s poems and stories were extraordinarily popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, but after World War I his reputation as a serious writer suffered through his being widely viewed as a jingoistic imperialist. The Elephant's Child is one of the wonderful Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. Originally the elephant had a short nose the size of a boot, flexible but useless for grasping things. One little elephant was insatiably inquisitive. He asked so many questions that all his relations spanked him. They all spanked him and told him to hush. Then he asked Kolokolo Bird, who told him to go the Limpopo River and find out. On the way there he met and asked the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake, who also spanked him. Then he came to the river and found the Crocodile, who told him to come and hear the whispered answer. When he came close, the Crocodile caught him by his nose and tried to pull him into the water. The Elephant’s Child resisted, helped by the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake, but his nose was pulled out into a long trunk before the Crocodile let go. Enjoy free online English audiobook “The Elephant's Child”, Rudyard Kipling’s short story.
