402 RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO [ch. xiv 



On the ashes of the fresh burn the footprmts of the 

 game showed ahnost as distinctly as on snow. One 

 morning we saw where a herd of elephant, cows and 

 calves, had come down the night before to drink at a 

 big bay of the Nile, three or four miles north of our 

 camp. Numerous hippo tracks showed that during the 

 darkness these beasts wandered freely a mile or two 

 inland. They often wandered behind our camp at 

 night. Always beside these night-trails we found 

 withered remnants of water cabbage and other aquatic 

 plants which they had carried inland with them — I 

 suppose accidentally on their backs. On several occa- 

 sions where we could only make out scrapes on the 

 ground the hippo trails puzzled us, being so far inland 

 that we thought they might be those of rhinos, until we 

 would come on some patch of ashes or of soft soil where 

 we could trace the four toe-marks. The rhino has but 

 three toes, the one in the middle being very big ; it 

 belongs, with the tapir and horse, to the group of 

 ungulates which tends to develop one digit of each foot 

 at the expense of all the others, a group which in a 

 long-past geological age was the predominant imgulate 

 group of the world. The hippo, on the contrary, belongs 

 to the class of such cloven-hoofed creatures as the cow 

 and pig, in the group of ungulates which has developed 

 equally two main digits in each foot — a group much 

 more numerously represented than the other in the 

 world of to-day. 



As the hippos grew familiar with the camp they 

 became bolder and more venturesome after nightfall. 

 They grunted and brayed to one another throughout 

 the night, splashed and M^allowed among the reeds, and 

 came close to the tents during their dry-land rambles in 

 the darkness. One night, in addition to the hippo 



