THE OKAPI 341 



The flesh of the Giraffe is excellent, and that of the young 

 is an especial delicacy ; but it is for its hide, an inch in 

 thickness, and fetching from ^3 to ^5, that it has been 

 hunted so mercilessly. He, however, who would now seek 

 for it must leave the haunts of man and penetrate pathless 

 wilds, wide and arid wastes, where the lion prowls and 

 the hyaena and the wild dog hunt their prey. Here man 

 is the enemy least to be feared ; but the Giraffe often 

 falls before the lion, though not without resistance. Ren- 

 dered desperate by necessity, it uses its hoofs as weapons, 

 and oftener still will it bear away its ferocious antagonist 

 clinging on, with teeth and talons, before sinking prostrate 

 in death. Even when happy and active the Giraffe is 

 strangely mute, and not even in its death-agonies does it 

 give vent to the slightest sound. 



OKAPI (Okapi johnstoni). 

 Plate XXXIX. Fig. i. 



Little is known of the Okapi, which white man had never 

 seen, alive or dead, until the twentieth century. When 

 H. M. Stanley journeyed through the great fermenting vat 

 of Central Africa in his task to relieve Emin Pasha, his 

 most interesting discovery was the existence of a hitherto 

 unknown pigmy people in the great Semliki forest between 

 Uganda and the Congo Free State. 



The great explorer maintained that the Semliki region 

 contained animals that were yet strangers to the naturalist, 

 and in addition to some new animals that he had seen, the 

 dwarfs had told him of an animal like an ass which they 

 captured in pits. Unfortunately the performance of Stanley's 

 main purpose, and the straits to which he and his com- 

 panions were reduced, allowed little or no time for natural 

 history investigations ; and it fell to the lot of Sir Harry 

 Johnston to put the explorer's statement to the proof some 

 eleven years later, when he undertook to escort home a 

 party of pigmies whom the authorities had prevented being 

 taken to Europe for exhibition purposes. 



When Sir Harry Johnston questioned the dwarfs con- 



