A RIDE THROUGH RHINO COUNTRY . 309 
and over the flat green thorn trees, is surely one of the 
strangest and most beautiful sights the animal world offers 
to man. As he stands and dips and bends and twists his 
nine-foot long neck in and out among the armed branches 
of the tree, he is grace personified. I was able to watch 
seven of these creatures, the king, his harem and his children, 
all gathered around one green-topped tree. From seven 
points of vantage they dipped into it at once, stooping under 
an unusually keenly armed bough, bending over another, 
their necks seeming to twist two or three ways at once. I 
had the good fortune to come very near without alarming 
them, and with my Zeiss glass, could see them as though they 
were not more than ten yards away. But when at last the 
treacherous breeze betrayed us, and they plunged into flight! 
well, no one could call their movements graceful. The 
immensely long forelegs are thrown forward, as you see a 
very high-stepping horse sometimes throw his forelegs for- 
ward, till the hoof, for the faction of a second is pointed 
straight out in front. The giraffe makes this motion with 
a sort of jerk at the end of it, as though he intended in the 
first instance to fling his hoof as far as he could forward, and 
then as a sort of afterthought brings it to the ground, then 
when it reaches earth he flounders forward with his high 
shoulders, lifts both ungainly hindlegs and plants them 
almost together. There is a great antediluvian lizard 
known to us, who had two brains, one to move his body 
and another to move his abnormally long tail. It looks 
as though this giraffe, like the long lizard, also needed 
two brains, one to move his hind legs and another to move 
his forelegs, and as though the two brains wouldn’t act 
perfectly together. 
And now, coming back toward the river, camp is near. 
Is it possible that this upper country looking so fresh, so 
green, so shady, the streams running clear as in the hills of 
Ireland and Scotland, lies within twenty-five miles of the 
