74 THE WHITE RHINOCEROS 



was recently killed in a fight, which must have 

 been worth witnessing, with the solitary elephant 

 the Reserve boasts ; two more broke away from 

 their sanctuary, and were speared by natives into 

 whose gardens they had penetrated ; and a fourth 

 fell over a precipice during a severe thunder- 

 storm, and died of the injuries he received. 



After many years of uncertainty — almost of 

 despair — lest the great white rhinoceros should 

 be upon the point of becoming extinct, it was 

 suddenly rediscovered, I believe in the Lado 

 Enclave on the Nile ; and it has since been 

 ascertained that at this point, as also on por- 

 tions of the Upper Congo and in the Western 

 Soudan, it exists in such numbers as to set at 

 rest for centuries to come all fear of its final 

 extermination. 



The extraordinary break which occurs be- 

 tween the two far-removed portions of the African 

 Continent wherein the white rhinoceros occurs, 

 extending, as it does, from the South Central 

 Zambezi to the Upper Congo, is very difficult to 

 account for. I have, however, sometimes thought 

 that this animal may originally have worked its 

 way down through the western central portion of 

 the continent of Africa at a time when the great 

 forests of the Congo were as yet undeveloped, and 

 before they stretched so far to the eastward as 

 they do at the present day. Spreading over 

 Mashonaland, Matabeleland, and the country to 

 the south, these animals were thus, in the course 

 of ages, completely cut off from their northern 

 brethren by the gradually eastward-spreading 



