34 
ROOSEVELT HUNTING GROUNDS . 
gray monkeys have found the safest of hiding-places and of homes. 
There no climbing serval, cat or leopard can do them harm, and up and 
down the sheer sides of the cliffs they race and play—they look just like 
flies walking on the ceiling; not like animals at all. 
“As I got nearer still to the densely wooded country that lies before 
me, the masses of rock gradually soften their outline and merge them¬ 
selves in higher and more regular hills and ridges, always covered with 
greenery, that rise up and up till they meet the great flanks of Kenia. 
The sun was now high in the heaven—yet the vapors still clung among 
these purple-blue foothills. In other lands you see the clouds rise up 
slowly, steadily from the woodland. Here sometimes they have a way 
of rising all their own—the breeze bids them be going, but they linger 
and cling as it were to their home of the night that is over.” 
GREAT HUNTING GROUNDS OF LAIKIPIA PLAINS. 
The above is from the pen of Dr. W. S. Rainsford, a former New 
York clergyman, who has tracked and killed big game all over the 
grounds covered by the Roosevelt expedition, from Mount Elgon, above 
Lake Victoria Nyanza, to the Mount Kenia region. In one day’s 
approach to that glorious mountain, through various tracts of beauties 
and surprises, he records a sudden stumbling on two rhinos among the 
bush; in his circuit to avoid them, running into an ostrich family hid¬ 
den in a gully; a striking view of seven giraffes twining their necks and 
feeding among the topmost boughs of a thorn tree; meeting herds of 
oryx on the plains, and footprints of lions, elephants and antelopes cross¬ 
ing his path in all directions; and the noiseless crawling of a huge croco¬ 
dile from a river sand bank into the yellow stream. Finally comes a 
stretch of curving, green meadows pressing up to the mountain forests 
of Mount Kenia. Dense as these are, with giant bamboo more than 
sixty feet in height, they have been penetrated to the bare uplands, ten 
thousand feet above. Herds of elephant and buffalo are common in 
these almost untrodden mountain solitudes; but the chosen home of 
the rhinoceros is along the dry and barren slopes of the Guaso Nyiro 
River, covered with cactus growths. 
In these terrible cactus jungles of the Laikipia Plains have occurred 
some of the most narrow escapes, and also the most awful deaths, of 
rhinoceros hunters. Further away from the river are favorite grounds 
