THE RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO 483 



perched on trees overhanging the water, and flew away, or 

 plunged like stones into the stream, as I approached; her- 

 ons of many kinds rose from the marshy edges of the bays 

 and inlets; wattled and spur-winged plovers circled over- 

 head; and I saw a party of hippopotami in a shallow on 

 the other side of the nearest channel, their lazy bulks raised 

 above water as they basked asleep in the sun. The semi- 

 diurnal slate-and-yellow bats flitted from one scantily leaved 

 tree to another, as I disturbed them. At the foot of a steep 

 bluff, several yards from the water, a crocodile lay. I 

 broke its neck with a soft-nosed bullet from the little Spring- 

 field; for the plated skin of a crocodile offers no resistance 

 to a modern rifle. We dragged the ugly man-eater up the 

 bank, and sent one of the porters back to camp to bring out 

 enough men to carry the brute in bodily. It was a female, 

 containing thirty eggs. We did not find any crocodile's 

 nest; but near camp, in digging a hole for the disposal of 

 refuse, we came on a clutch of a dozen eggs of the monitor 

 lizard. They were in sandy loam, two feet and a half be- 

 neath the surface, without the vestige of a burrow leading 

 to them. When exposed to the sun, unlike the crocodile's 

 eggs, they soon burst. Evidently the young are hatched 

 in the cool earth and dig their way out. 



We continued our walk and soon came on some kob. 

 At two hundred yards I got a fine buck, though he went a 

 quarter of a mile. Then, at a hundred and fifty yards, I 

 dropped a straw-colored Nile hartebeest. Sending in the 

 kob and hartebeest used up all our porters but two, and I 

 mounted the little mule and turned toward camp, having 

 been out three hours. Soon Gouvimali pointed out a big 

 bustard, marching away through the grass a hundred yards 

 off. I dismounted, shot him through the base of the neck, 

 and remounted. Then Kongoni pointed out, some distance 

 ahead, a bushbuck ram, of the harnessed kind found in 

 this part of the Nile Valley. Hastily dismounting, and 

 stealing rapidly from ant-heap to ant-heap, until I was not 

 much over a hundred yards from him, I gave him a fatal 



