Three elephants stood tethered to short posts that had been hammered into the ground, happily grazing while a man wearing red shorts and little else scrubbed one of them down with a broom. A pair of acrobats practised leaping over one another while two children sat nearby, more interested in the pictures they were drawing in the dirt than in the rehearsal. Further back, beneath the shade of a great oak, sat the largest woman Nathan had ever laid eyes on. She must have stood at an immense height, because even sitting she would have been taller than Nathan, and he was approaching six feet. Behind her, a young boy stood on a large stool, putting rollers into the woman’s jet black hair.
He walked past a cage where a pair of tigers were grooming themselves, and then by a tent under which bench
