A RIDE THROUGH RHINO COUNTRY 305 
The suddenness, the unexpectedness of this land, is one 
ofits many charms. A ride of a few miles is full of surprises. 
You never can tell what you may meet or see. 
The spaciousness of the splendid landscape, the moun- 
tains standing solitary, as though they would not be crowded 
on, makes it unlike any land | have ever seen. 
I am on the northwest side of Kenia and about forty 
miles still from the mountain’s base, though it is hard to 
believe it. And behind me and before me, as I face it, the 
level country is thickly sown for twenty-five miles with great 
masses of red granite, out-croppings of the same formation. 
A Celt would say that the Devil and the giants had been 
at war or play in the old days, and that these rocks were the 
mighty sling-stones they had hurled from the mountains at 
each other. Some of them are one hundred feet high, some 
nearer four hundred feet, and all are imposing. 
Around their rocky bases the grass grows so smooth and 
fresh that it might be a carefully tended lawn — the dis- 
integration of the great stones must have added richness to 
the soil, and the sward has buried their broad bases for some 
feet under its carpet. ‘Then the prairie falls away from one, 
rises gently towards the next in curves and dips of green. 
They are half a mile apart, or only fifty yards as it may 
be. Some rise sheer and steep with no crack or crevice for 
bush or vine. On some dwarfed wild fig trees climb and 
cling. All are of rich red granite, and the sides and crowns 
shine and glisten gloriously in the light of the rising and set- 
ting sun. In the highest and most inaccessible, great troups 
of little gray monkeys have found the safest of hiding places. 
There no climbing cerval cat or leopard can do them harm, 
and up and down the sheer sides of the cliffs they race and 
play, looking like flies walking on the ceiling, not like 
animals at all. 
As I came between two of those great turreted rocky 
islands, there suddenly arose an outcry so dreadful that 
