THE PINJIH RHINO. 45 



Years before, " in the days when the white man had 

 not yet come into the country," and when he was a 

 young man, he had felled a patch of forest in the 

 Pinjih valley to make a plantation of hill padi. The 

 crop was nearing the harvest, and he was sitting at 

 night with his gun to keep away the pigs and deer, 

 when this rhinoceros came out of the forest and fed 

 close up to his house. He fired, and heard the brute 

 rush away and fall at the forest's edge. The next morn- 

 ing he went with a youngster to hack off its horn, 

 when the animal threw off the semblance of death 

 and charged him. He fell, and the rhinoceros did not 

 gore him with his horn, as is the custom of the African 

 animal, but bit him with its enormous razor-edged 

 teeth. The boy ran away, and in a few minutes re- 

 turned with some ten men, whose approach frightened 

 the brute. Kanda Daud appeared to be dead when 

 they picked him up and took him to his house. 

 Though the wretched man had been bitten in almost 

 every part of his body, he recovered, and as he limped 

 beside me to see the dead body of his old enemy, 

 he showed me the cicatrices of his wounds. The 

 calf and the fleshy part of the thigh of the left leg had 

 atrophied ; they had been bitten away ; and the ball 

 of his toe reached the ground in a painful hobble. 

 On his ribs and under one arm were great drawn 

 lines of hideous white, such as one associates with 

 the idea of a scald. The muscles of an arm had 

 disappeared, and there only remained a bone. It 

 was marvellous that he had recovered ; but when I 

 told him so he replied that when he was picked up 

 and taken home, his hands and arms were found to 



