AN EXPLOEATION IN THE FAK EAST. 437 



assuredly benefit from having the bull's-eye of outside observa- 

 tion turned on to her obscurity. I will here speak only of the 

 glorious field that the country offers to the sportsman incom- 

 parably the finest in the whole world. Africa may be thought 

 to be better, but it is not so if India be looked at as a whole. 

 Perhaps more animals in number or in size may be slaughtered 

 in Central Africa ; but that does not surely imply superior 

 sport In reading accounts of African shooting, I have often 

 wondered how men could continue to wade through the 

 sickening details of daily massacre of half-tame animals offer- 

 ing themselves to the rifle on its vast open plains. In India 

 fewer animals will perhaps be Ragged ; all will have to be 

 worked for, and some perhaps fought for. The sport will be 

 far superior ; and the sportsman will return from India with a 

 collection of trophies which Africa cannot match. Africa and 

 India both have their elephants. We cannot offer a hippopo- 

 tamus ; but we have a rhinoceros superior in a sporting point 

 of view to his African relative. We have a wild buffalo as 

 savage and with far superior horns to the Cape species ; and 

 we have four other species of wild bovines besides, to which 

 there is nothing comparable in Africa. In felines, besides a 

 lion, a panther, and a hunting-leopard, almost identical with 

 those of Africa, we have the tiger, and one, if not two, other 

 species of leopard. Our black antelope is unsurpassed by any 

 of the many antelopes of Africa ; and besides him we have 

 fourteen species of antelopes and wild goats and sheep in our 

 hills and plains, affording the finest stalking in the world, to 

 compare with the other antelopes of Africa. Africa has no 

 deer properly speaking at all, except the Barbary stag, which 

 is out of the regular beat of sportsmen. India, on the other 

 hand, has nine species of antlered deer. We have three bears ; 

 Africa has none at all. There is no country in the world that 



