CH. XIV] GREAT HEAT 417 



water glimmered in the moon rays, and round about the 

 dry landscape shone with a strange, spectral light. 



Near the pond, just before camping, I shot a couple 

 of young waterbuck bulls for food, and while we were 

 pitching the tents a small herd of elephants — cows, 

 young bulls, and calves, seemingly disturbed by a grass 

 fire which was burning a little way off — came up within 

 four hundred yards of us. At first we mistook one 

 large cow for a bull, and running quickly from bush to 

 bush, diagonally to its course, I got within sixty yards, 

 and watched it pass at a quick shuffling walk, lifting 

 and curling its trunk. The blindness of both elephant 

 and rhino has never been sufficiently emphasized in 

 books. Near camp was the bloody, broken skeleton 

 of a young wart-hog boar, killed by a lion the previous 



' night. There were a number of lions in the neiglibour- 

 hood, and they roared at intervals all night long. Next 

 morning, after Grogan and I had started from camp, 



I when the sun had been up an hour, we heard one roar 

 loudly less than a mile away. Running toward the 

 place, w^e tried to find the lion, but near by a small river 



I ran through beds of reeds, and the fires had left many 

 patches of tall, yellow, half-burned grass, so that it had 

 ample cover, and our search was fruitless. 



Near the pond were green parrots and brilliant wood 



j hoopoos, rollers, and sunbirds, and buck of the ordinary 



, kinds drank at it. A duiker which I shot for the table 



I had been feeding on grass tips and on the stems and 



I leaves of a small, low-growing plant. 



After giving up the quest for the lion, Grogan and I, 

 with our gun-bearers, spent the day walking over the 



' great dry flats of burnt grass-land and sparse, withered 



' forest. The heat grew intense as the sun rose higher 

 and higher. Hour after hour we plodded on across 



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