THE GUASO NYERO 
305 
The noise puzzled it much; with tail erect and head tossing 
and twisting, it made little rushes hither and thither, but 
finally drew oflF. Next day, in shifting camp, Cuninghame 
and I were twice obliged to dismount and keep guard over 
the safari while it marched by within a hundred yards of a 
highly puzzled rhino, which trotted to and fro in the bush, 
evidently uncertain whether or not to let its bewilderment 
turn into indignation. 
The camp to which we thus shifted was on the banks 
of the Guaso Nyero, on the edge of an open glade in a shady 
grove of giant mimosas. It was a beautiful camp, and in 
the soft tropic nights I sat outside my tent and watched 
the full moon rising through and above the tree tops. 
There was absolutely no dew at night, by the way. The 
Guaso Nyero runs across and along the equator, through 
a desert country, eastward into the dismal Lorian swamp, 
where it disappears, save in very wet seasons, when it 
continues to the Tana. At our camp it was a broad, rapid, 
muddy stream infested with crocodiles. Along its banks^ 
grew groves of ivory-nut palms, their fronds fan-shaped, 
their tall trunks forked twenty or thirty feet from the ground, 
each stem again forking—something like the antlers of a 
black-tail buck. In the frond of a small palm of this kind 
we found a pale-colored, very long-tailed tree mouse, in its 
nest, which was a ball of chopped straw. Spurfowl and 
francolin abounded, their grating cries being heard every¬ 
where; I shot a few as well as one or two sandgrouse; 
and with the rifle I knocked off the heads of two guinea 
fowls. The last feat sounds better in the narration than 
it was in the performance; for I wasted nearly a beltful of 
cartridges in achieving it, as the guineas were shy and ran 
