VIEW ON" THE NJIRI SWAMl'S DURING THE INUNDATIONS 



XI 



Rhinoceroses 



\\ /"HEX you have spent a year travelling over Masai- 

 V V Xyika, and have thus seen for yourself the 

 number of rhinoceroses still existing in that region, you 

 are able to form some notion of the extent to which 

 elephants must have flourished on its plains and in its 

 forests before the days when they began to be hunted 

 systematically by trailers. Rhinoceroses did not offer the 

 traders an adequate equivalent in their horns for the 

 trouble and danger of hunting them, so they were not 

 much troubled about until recently, when the supply of 

 elephants began to run short. It is only during the last 

 few years that their numbers have been decimated. 



In the course ot the year I spent there I saw about 

 six hundred rhinoceroses with my own eyes, and found 

 the tracks of thousands. It is astonishing how numerous 

 they are in this region. Travellers who merely pass 

 through the country by the caravan-routes would marvel 

 if in the dry weather they found themselves on the top 

 of a hill 7,000 feet high, and could see the huge crowds 



204 



