202 
ON SAFARI 
retinue ! Two other ostrich nests found that year by 
friends contained as many as twenty-seven and thirty- 
four eggs respectively. The cock ostrich, being black 
and conspicuous, sits on the eggs by night only, the 
brown invisible hen taking the post of danger by day. 
As light strengthened the wide prairies were seen to 
swarm with game, chiefly zebras, gazelles and harte- 
beests—the latter fearfully wild ; yet even at these great 
distances the striking difference in the form of their 
horns from those of B. neumanni w T as perfectly distin¬ 
guishable. The latter diverge at an acute angle re¬ 
sembling the letter V, while those of B. coJcei spread out 
laterally before ascending like two capital L’s— I_I— 
the second reversed. 
All the hartebeests carry the head in a rigid upright 
position—that is, the long face, as viewed in profile, is 
held almost at a right angle with the earth; and the 
curious effect is accentuated (especially in B. jacksoni) 
by the set of the horns, which, rising from long pedicles 
in the same vertical plane, prolong the already ex¬ 
travagant length of the head. 
The game being utterly inaccessible and my own 
time so limited, I resorted to taking some rather reckless 
shots. With shame I admit firing that morning more 
cartridges than on any other day in Africa. In the 
result, I “fluked” a bull with a ball between the eyes, 
and the next shot gave me a second—both at extreme 
ranges. Though big bulls, neither carried a first-rate 
head. 
From the spot where No. 2 fell on the ridge of a 
rocky bluff we looked down upon the Athi River, its 
course indicated by belts of brushwood and tall forest- 
trees that fringe the banks. Spying from here, we made 
out a group of ten wildebeests, standing listless in a 
green corrie a mile away; but with a single old bull 
alert as sentry. These also proved wilder than wild, and 
stalking practically impossible. Though undulated, the 
sloping gradients of this veld are altogether too spacious, 
the angles too gentle, to afford any real advantage. 
