300 THE GUASO NYEHQ [ch. xi 
forward would give it our wind. I did not wish to kill 
it, and I was beginning to feel about rhino just as 
Alice did in Looking-Glass country, when the elephants 
“did bother so.” Having spied us, the beast at once 
cocked its ears and tail, and assumed its usual absurd 
resemblance to a huge and exceedingly alert and 
interested pig. But with a rhino tragedy sometimes 
treads on the heels of comedy, and I watched it 
sharply, my rifle cocked, while I had all the men shout 
in unison to scare it away. The noise puzzled it much ; 
with tail erect, and head tossing and twisting, it made 
little rushes hither and thither, but finally drew off. 
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 
