d faded from the sky, leaving us in pitch darkness.
I sent Memba Sasa across to pick up the effects we had left on the
opposite ridge, while I myself struck directly across the flat toward
camp.

I had plunged ahead thus, for two or three hundred yards, when I was
brought up short by the violent snort of a rhinoceros just off the
starboard bow. He was very close, but I was unable to locate him in the
dusk. A cautious retreat and change of course cleared me from him, and
I was about to start on again full speed when once more I was halted by
another rhinoceros, this time dead ahead. Attempting to back away from
him, I aroused another in my rear; and as though this were not enough a
fourth opened up to the left.

It was absolutely impossible to see anything ten yards away unless it
happened to be silhouetted against the sky. I backed cautiously toward
a little bush, with a vague idea of having something to dodge around.
As the old hunter said when, unarmed, he met the bear, "Anything, even
a newspaper, would have come handy." To my great joy I backed against
a conical ant hill four or five feet high. This I ascended and began
anti-rhino demonstrations. I had no time to fool with rhinos, anyway. I
wanted to get through that jungle before the leopards left their family
circles. I hurled clods of earth and opprobrious shouts and epithets
in the four directions of my four obstreperous friends, and I thought
I counted four reluctant departures. Then, with considerable doubt, I
descended from my ant hill and hurried down the slope, stumbling
over grass hummocks, colliding with bushes, tangling with vines, but
progressing in a gratifyingly rhinoless condition. Five minutes cautious
but rapid feeling my way brought me through the jungle. Shortly after I
raised the campfires; and so got home.

The next two days were repetitions, with slight variation, of this
experience, minus the rhinos! Starting from camp before daylight we were
only in time to see the herd-always aggravatingly on the other side of
the cover, no matter which side we selected for our approach, slowly
grazing into the dense jungle. And always they emerged so late and so
far away that our very best efforts failed to get us near them before
dark. The margin always so narrow, however, that our hopes were alive.

On the fourth day, which must be our last in Longeetoto, we found that
the herd had shifted to fresh cover three miles along the base of the
mountains. W