THE GUASO NYERO 359 



walking over a little ridge of rocks, we saw a rhino sixty 

 yards off. To walk forward would give it our wind; I did 

 not wish to kill it; and I was beginning to feel about rhino 

 the way Alice did in Looking Glass country, when the ele- 

 phants "did bother so." Having spied us the beast at once 

 cocked its ears and tail, and assumed its usual absurd re- 

 semblance to a huge and exceedingly alert and interested 

 pig. But with a rhino tragedy sometimes treads on the 

 heels of comedy, and I watched it sharply, my rifle cocked, 

 while I had all the men shout in unison to scare it away. 

 The noise puzzled it much; with tail erect and head tossing 

 and twisting, it made little rushes hither and thither, but 

 finally drew off. Next day, in shifting camp, Cuninghame 

 and I were twice obliged to dismount and keep guard over 

 the safari while it marched by within a hundred yards of a 

 highly puzzled rhino, which trotted to and fro in the bush, 

 evidently uncertain whether or not to let its bewilderment 

 turn into indignation. 



The camp to which we thus shifted was on the banks 

 of the Guaso Nyero, on the edge of an open glade in a shady 

 grove of giant mimosas. It was a beautiful camp, and in 

 the soft tropic nights I sat outside my tent and watched 

 the full moon rising through and above the tree tops. 

 There was absolutely no dew at night, by the way. The 

 Guaso Nyero runs across and along the equator, through 

 a desert country, eastward into the dismal Lorian swamp, 

 where it disappears, save in very wet seasons, when it 

 continues to the Tana. At our camp it was a broad, rapid, 

 muddy stream infested with crocodiles. Along its banks 

 grew groves of ivory-nut palms, their fronds fan-shaped, 

 their tall trunks forked twenty or thirty feet from the ground, 

 each stem again forking something like the antlers of a 

 black-tail buck. In the frond of a small palm of this kind 

 we found a pale-colored, very long-tailed tree mouse, in its 

 nest, which was a ball of chopped straw. Spurfowl and 

 francolin abounded, their grating cries being heard every- 

 where; I shot a few as well as one or two sandgrouse; 



