204 A BOOK-LOVER'S HOLIDAYS 



perched on their backs. From where I stood 

 looking at them hartebeest, kob, waterbuck, and 

 oribi were also all in sight. 



I could mention day after day such as these, 

 when we saw myriads of game, often of many 

 kinds. One afternoon of heat and sunlight on 

 the parched Kapiti plains, teeming with wild 

 life, I followed a lion, on horseback. During 

 the gallop he ran for several minutes almost in 

 the middle of a mixed herd of hartebeest and 

 zebra. When he came to bay, I walked in on 

 him. In the background the barren hills, 

 ''like giants at a hunting lay." Bands of harte- 

 beests and of showy zebras, joined by grotesquely 

 capering wildebeests and by lovely, long-horned 

 gazelles, stood round in a wide, irregular ring, 

 to see their two foes fight to the death. Another 

 day, at burning noon, in a waste of sparsely 

 scattered, withered thorn-trees, west of Redjaf 

 on the upper Nile, I killed a magnificent giant 

 eland bull; and during the hunt I saw elephant, 

 giraffe, buffalo, straw-colored Nile hartebeest, 

 and roan antelope, as big as horses, with shining 

 coats which melted in ghostly fashion into the 

 shimmering heat haze of the dry landscape. 



In short, for months my companions and I 

 travelled and hunted in the Pleistocene. Man 

 and beasts alike were of types our own world 



