300 THE GUASO NYERO [ch. xi 



forward would give it our wind. I did not wish to kill 

 it, and 1 was beginning to feel about rhino just as 

 Alice did in Looking-Glass country, when the elephants 

 "did bother so." Having spied us, the beast at once 

 cocked its ears and tail, and assumed its usual absurd 

 resemblance to a huge and exceedingly alert and 

 interested pig. But with a rhino tragedy sometimes 

 treads on the heels of comedy, and I watched it 

 sharply, my rifle cocked, wliile I had all the men shout 

 in unison to scare it away. The noise puzzled it much ; 

 witii tail erect, and head tossing and twisting, it made 

 little rushes hither and thither, but finally drew off. 

 Next day, in shifting camp, Cuninghame and I were 

 twice obliged to dismount and keep guard over the 

 safari while it marched by within a hundred yards of 

 a highly puzzled rhino, which trotted to and fro in the 

 bush, evidently uncertain whether or not to let its 

 bewilderment turn into indignation. 



The camp to which we thus shifted was on the banks 

 of the Guaso Nyero, on the edge of an open glade in 

 a shady grove of giant mimosas. It was a beautiful 

 camp, and in the soft tropic nights I sat outside my 

 tent and watched the full moon rising through and 

 above the tree-tops. There was absolutely no dew at 

 night, by the way. The Guaso Nyero runs across and 

 along the equator, through a desert country, eastward 

 into the dismal I^orian swamp, where it disappears, save 

 in very wet seasons, when it continues to the Tana. At 

 our camp it was a broad, rapid, muddy stream infested 

 with crocodiles. Along its banks grew groves of ivory- 

 nut palms, their fronds fan-shaped, their tall trunks 

 forked twenty or thirty feet from the ground, eacii 

 stem again forking — something like the antlers of a 

 black-tail buck. In the irond of a small palm of this 



