THE RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO 491 



running quickly from bush to bush, diagonally to its course, 

 i got within sixty yards, and watched it pass at a quick 

 shuffling walk, lifting and curling its trunk. The blindness 

 of both elephant and rhino has never been sufficiently em- 

 phasized in books. Near camp was the bloody, broken 

 skeleton of a young wart-hog boar, killed by a lion the pre- 

 vious night. There were a number of lions in the neigh- 

 borhood, and they roared at intervals all night long. Next 

 morning, after Grogan and I had started from camp, when 

 the sun had been up an hour, we heard one roar loudly less 

 than a mile away. Running toward the place we tried to 

 find the lion; but near by a small river ran through beds 

 of reeds, and the fires had left many patches of tall, yellow, 

 half-burned grass, so that it had ample cover, and our search 

 was fruitless. 



Near the pond were green parrots and brilliant wood 

 hoopoos, rollers, and sunbirds; and buck of the ordinary 

 kinds drank at it. A duiker which I shot for the table had 

 been feeding on grass tips and on the stems and leaves of a 

 small, low-growing plant. 



After giving up the quest for the lion Grogan and I, 

 with our gun-bearers, spent the day walking over the 

 great dry flats of burnt grass-land and sparse, withered 

 forest. The heat grew intense as the sun rose higher and 

 higher. Hour after hour we plodded on across vast level 

 stretches, or up or down inclines so slight as hardly to be 

 noticeable. The black dust of the burn rose in puffs be- 

 neath our feet; and now and then we saw dust devils, 

 violent little whirlwinds, which darted right and left, rais- 

 ing to a height of many feet gray funnels of ashes and 

 withered leaves. In places the coarse grass had half re- 

 sisted the flames, and rose above our heads. Here and 

 there bleached skulls of elephant and rhino, long dead, 

 showed white against the charred surface of the soil. Every- 

 where, crossing and recrossing one another, were game 

 trails, some slightly marked, others broad and hard, and 

 beaten deep into the soil by the feet of the giant creatures 



