THE RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO 399 



slate and yellow bats were utterly different. They were 

 very abundant, hanging in the thinly leaved acacias around 

 the tents, and, as everywhere else, were crepuscular, indeed 

 to a large extent actually diurnal, in habit. They saw 

 well and flew well by daylight, passing the time hanging 

 from twigs. They became active before sunset. In catching 

 insects they behaved not like swallows but like flycatchers. 

 Except that they perched upside down so to speak, that is, 

 that they hung from the twigs instead of sitting on them, 

 their conduct was precisely that of a phcebe bird or a wood 

 peewee. Each bat hung from its twig until it espied a 

 passing insect, when it swooped down upon it, and after 

 a short flight returned with its booty to the same perch 

 or went on to a new one close by; and it kept twitching 

 its long ears as it hung head downward devouring its prey. 

 There were no native villages in our immediate neigh- 

 borhood, and the game was not shy. There were many 

 buck: waterbuck, kob, hartebeest, bushbuck, reedbuck, 

 oribi, and duiker. Every day or two Kermit or I would 

 shoot a buck for the camp. We generally went out together 

 with our gun-bearers, Kermit striding along in front, with 

 short trousers and leggings, his knees bare. Sometimes only 

 one of us would go out. The kob and waterbuck were 

 usually found in bands, and were perhaps the commonest 

 of all. The buck seemed to have no settled time for feed- 

 ing. Two oribi which I shot were feeding right in the open, 

 just at noon, utterly indifferent to the heat. There were 

 hippo both in the bay and in the river. All night long 

 we could hear them splashing, snorting, and grunting; 

 they were very noisy, sometimes uttering a strange, long- 

 drawn bellow, a little like the exhaust of a giant steam- 



