HAUNTS OF BABOONS 
will turn it toward an animal or person with whom they are pleased, or 
toward a mirror when one is placed in their cage. Darwin has much to say 
on this curious circumstance in his ‘Descent of Man ” and I recall how one 
of his Arab friends told Burton, during his adventurous journey to Mecca, 
that the Arabian apes catch and kill kites by exposing the pink stern and 
concealing the remainder of their bodies: the bird pounces upon what 
appears to be raw meat, “and presently finds himself viciously plucked 
alive.” To our eyes, however, these gaudy naked parts only add to the 
ugliness of all baboons, which their overhanging eyebrows, small eyes, 
ferocious disposition, and filthy habits intensify. 
The fur of the baboons is blackish or greenish or a.yellow- 
ish gray, grizzled by the fact that every hair is ringed with 
various colors; or the coat may be party-colored, the drill, for 
example, having whitish beard and cheeks, and the gelada a 
brown mane and gray chest with a black body. 
Baboons, unlike other monkeys, are denizens of open coun- 
try rather than of forest, and lovers of rocks and deserts, where 
they travel about in large bands. ‘I shall never forget,’’ re- 
marks Alfred Evans, writing in The Field (London) of the 
chacma of South Africa, ‘the first time I came across a troop 
of them.” 
“This was on an undulating stony range of hillocks, where the spek- 
boom (elephant tree) luxuriates, and the rough spinous crimson-crested 
aloe rears its head to a height of some ten or fifteen feet, often mistaken at 
a distance, by one unaccustomed to their peculiar erectness, for human 
beings, having the appearance of solitary sentinels keeping guard in the 
unbroken stillness of a vast wilderness. This is the natural home of the 
baboon; here he finds his most delectable food, succulent roots and bulbs, 
beetles, scorpions, centipedes. His living prey, his tit-bits, he hunts and 
rummages for amongst the myriads of loose stones that lie about in every 
direction; these he cautiously and gently rolls over with one hand, then 
pounces on his unsuspecting victims with the other. His sight is so keen 
and his grasp so unerring that nothing escapes — not the minutest larva 
or most agile insect. 
“Tn times of drought, when driven by hunger, I have known them do 
a vast amount of havoc among young lambs and kids . . . his object is not 
meat, but milk. (°His method of procedure is this: Finding a lamb or kid 
D 33 
