A RIDE THROUGH RHINO COUNTRY 305 



The suddenness, the unexpectedness of this land, is one 

 of its many charms. A ride of a few miles is full of surprises. 

 You never can tell what you may meet or see. 



The spaciousness of the splendid landscape, the moun- 

 tains standing solitary, as though they would not be crowded 

 on, makes it unlike any land I have ever seen. 



I am on the northwest side of Kenia and about forty 

 miles still from the mountain's base, though it is hard to 

 believe it. And behind me and before me, as I face it, the 

 level country is thickly sown for twenty-five miles with great 

 masses of red granite, out-croppings of the same formation. 

 A Celt would say that the Devil and the giants had been 

 at war or play in the old days, and that these rocks were the 

 mighty sling-stones they had hurled from the mountains at 

 each other. Some of them are one hundred feet high, some 

 nearer four hundred feet, and all are imposing. 



Around their rocky bases the grass grows so smooth and 

 fresh that it might be a carefully tended lawn -- the dis- 

 integration of the great stones must have added richness to 

 the soil, and the sward has buried their broad bases for some 

 feet under its carpet. Then the prairie falls away from one, 

 rises gently towards the next in curves and dips of green. 



They are half a mile apart, or only fifty yards as it may 

 be. Some rise sheer and steep with no crack or crevice for 

 bush or vine. On some dwarfed wild fig trees climb and 

 cling. All are of rich red granite, and the sides and crowns 

 shine and glisten gloriously in the light of the rising and set- 

 ting sun. In the highest and most inaccessible, great troups 

 of little gray monkeys have found the safest of hiding places. 

 There no climbing cerval cat or leopard can do them harm, 

 and up and down the sheer sides of the cliffs they race and 

 play, looking like flies walking on the ceiling, not like 

 animals at all. 



As I came between two of those great turreted rocky 

 islands, there suddenly arose an outcry so dreadful that 



