GREAT HEAT 
CH. Xiv] 
417 
water glimmered in the moon rays, and round about the 
dry landscape shone with a strange, spectral light. 
Near the pond, just before camping, I shot a couple 
of young waterbuck bulls for food, and while we were 
pitching the tents a small herd of elephants—cows, 
young bulls, and calves, seemingly disturbed by a grass 
fire which was 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 emphasized in 
books. Near camp was the bloody, broken skeleton 
of a young wart-hog boar, killed by a lion the previous 
night. There were a number of lions in the neighbour¬ 
hood, 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 
27 
