416 RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO [ch. xiv 
Cuninghame, Grogan, Heller, Kermit, and I now 
went off on a week’s safari inland, travelling as light as 
possible. The first day’s march brought us to the kraal 
of a local chief named Sururu. There were a few 
banana-trees and patches of scrawny cultivation round 
the little cluster of huts, ringed with a thorn fence, 
through which led a low door, and the natives owned 
goats and chickens. Sururu himself wore a white sheet 
of cotton as a toga, and he owned a red fez and a pair 
of baggy blue breeches, which last he generally carried 
over his shoulder. His people were very scantily clad 
indeed, and a few of them, both men and women, wore 
absolutely nothing except a string of blue beads around 
the waist or neck. Their ears had not been pierced and 
stretched like so many East African savages, but their 
lower lips were pierced for wooden ornaments and 
quills. They brought us eggs and chickens, which we 
paid for with American cloth, this cloth and some 
umbrellas constituting our stock of trade goods, or 
gift goods, for the Nile. 
The following day Sururu himself led us to our next 
camp, only a couple of hours away. It was a dry 
country of harsh grass, everywhere covered by a sparse 
growth of euphorbias and stunted thorns, which were 
never in sufficient numbers to make a forest, each little, 
well-nigh leafless tree, standing a dozen rods or so 
distant from its nearest fellow. Most of the grass had 
been burnt, and fires were still raging. Our camp was 
by a beautiful pond, covered with white and lilac water- 
lilies. We pitched our two tents on a bluff, under 
some large acacias that cast real shade. It was between 
two or three degrees north of the Equator. The moon, 
the hot January moon of the mid-tropics, was at the 
full, and the nights were very lovely ; the little sheet of 
