THE RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO 425 
burning a little way off, came up within four hundred yards 
of us. At first we mistook one large cow for a bull, and 
running quickly from bush to bush, diagonally to its course, 
I got within sixty yards, and watched it pass at a quick 
shuffling walk, lifting and curling its trunk. The blindness 
of both elephant and rhino has never been sufficiently em¬ 
phasized in books. Near camp was the bloody, broken 
skeleton of a young wart-hog boar, killed by a lion the pre¬ 
vious night. There were a number of lions in the neigh¬ 
borhood, and they roared at intervals all night long. Next 
morning, after Grogan and I had started from camp, when 
the sun had been up an hour, we heard one roar loudly less 
than a mile away. Running toward the place we tried to 
find the lion; but near by a small river ran through beds 
of reeds, and the fires had left many patches of tall, yellow, 
half-burned grass, so that it had ample cover, and our search 
was fruitless. 
Near the pond were green parrots and brilliant wood 
hoopoos, rollers, and sunbirds; and buck of the ordinary 
kinds drank at it. A duiker which I shot for the table had 
been feeding on grass tips and on the stems and leaves of a 
small, low-growing plant. 
After giving up the quest for the lion Grogan and I, 
with our gun-bearers, spent the day walking over the 
great dry flats of burnt grass land and sparse, withered 
forest. The heat grew intense as the sun rose higher and 
higher. Hour after hour we plodded on across vast level 
stretches, or up or down inclines so slight as hardly to be 
noticeable. The black dust of the burn rose in puffs be¬ 
neath our feet; and now and then we saw dust devils, 
violent little whirlwinds, which darted right and left, rais- 
