WHERE ROOSEVELT WILL HUNT 



253 



be remembered that most male African 

 elephants in captivity have shown them- 

 selves to be hopelessly savage), then at 

 least for its magnificent ivory the crea- 

 ture is worth preserving as an asset to 

 the state. If the Indian elephant shows 

 himself to be more docile than the Afri- 

 can elephant, it must be remembered, on 

 the other hand, that he is of very little 

 value for his ivory. 



THE MOST DREADED OP AFRICAN BEASTS 



I am afraid that blustering creature, 

 the rhinoceros, can be turned to no use- 

 ful purpose in the future of Africa, but 

 he is such a grotesque survival from the 

 great mammalian epoch that he should be 

 steadily preserved from extinction. The 

 rhinoceros, however, is a handful, to use 

 a colloquialism. All along the route of 

 the Uganda Railway game is being care- 

 fully protected, with the agreeable re- 

 sult that antelopes, zebras, and ostriches 

 graze close to the line, as fearless of man 

 as if they were in an English park. 

 Much the same condition may be ob- 

 served in parts of the Protectorate off 

 the beaten track, where British sports- 

 men have not had an opportunity to harry 

 and destroy. 



But in all these countries the rhinoc- 

 eros is not tamed by this tolerance, but 

 is apt to become a dangerous nuisance 

 by charging at all and everything at a 

 moment's notice when it is playful or 

 out of temper. Thus among a people 

 like the Masai it is much dreaded. The 

 Masai do not eat, and therefore do not 

 kill, game. They fear no wild beast but 

 the rhinoceros, because all other crea- 

 tures, if they are let alone, seem to ex- 

 perience, as a rule, no desire to attack 

 human beings. 



The rhinoceros, however, makes abso- 

 lutely unprovoked charges and occasion- 

 ally gores a man before he has time to 

 get out of the way. Fortunately these 

 huge beasts are very stupid and very 

 blind. They probably can see little or 

 nothing with any clearness that is ten 

 yards away from them. They are guided 

 entirely by their sense of smell, which, 

 however, is extraordinarily keen. 



The rhinoceros of which a picture is 

 here given (page 229) is the ordinary 

 pointed-lipped, black rhinoceros of Af- 

 rica, which ranges, or used to range, 

 from Cape Colony to Abyssinia and 

 Nubia, and thence, perhaps, across Af- 

 rica westward to Lake Chad and East- 

 ern Nigeria. So far as I am aware, the 

 rhinoceros has not been found to exist 

 in Africa west of the Central Niger, if, 

 indeed, it gets much farther west than 

 Lake Chad.* This is curious, if true, 

 because the other big beasts of the Afri- 

 can fauna, though, like the rhinoceros, 

 they mostly avoid the Congo and West 

 African forests, stretch in their distribu- 

 tion right across Africa, from Abyssinia 

 to Senegal. The two exceptions, how- 

 ever, to this rule seem to be the zebra 

 and the rhinoceros. Not infrequently 

 the East Africa rhinoceroses produce 

 horns of extraordinary length. The 

 record, I believe, is forty-seven inches 

 for the front horn. 



THAT PART OF 1 AFRICA WHERE ROOSEVELT 

 WILL HUNT IS PROBABLY THE MOST 

 INTERESTING REGION GEOGRAPH- 

 ICALLY IN THE WORLD 



That portion of the British sphere in 

 East Africa where Roosevelt will hunt 

 contains, within an area of some 150,000 

 square miles, nearly all the wonders, 

 most of the extremes, the most signal 

 beauties, and some of the horrors of the 

 Dark Continent. Portions of the sur- 

 face are endowed with the healthiest 

 climate to be found anywhere in tropical 

 Africa, yet there are also some districts 

 of extreme insalubrity. 



It offers to the naturalist the most re- 

 markable known forms among the Afri- 

 can mammals, birds, fish, butterflies, and 

 earth-worms, one of which is as large as 

 a snake and is colored a brilliant verdi- 

 ter-blue. In this Protectorate there are 

 forests of a tropical luxuriance only to 

 be matched in parts of the Congo Free 



^Rhinoceroses swarmed in the countries 

 to the north of Lake Chad in the days of 

 the Romans. This fact was reported by the 

 exploring Roman expedition under Septi- 

 mus Flaccus, sent south of Fezzan toward 

 Lake Chad at about A. D. 10. 



