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The necessity of commencing the chase, and the excitement of following it up, occupied all the time of the hunters. After a sharp run of about two miles, the camelopards began to show further signs of distress.
They had shot and otherwise killed camelopards by the score, but had not succeeded in capturing any young ones alive. Our hunters had left home with the determination to take back a pair of young giraffes, and to pay all expenses of their expedition by this, as also by the sale of hippopotamus teeth. The hope was not an unreasonable one.
A full hour was spent in finding a track that could, with any certainty, be pronounced that of a giraffe, and this had been made by the animal going in the direction of the sheds. Of course it was the spoor of the camelopards when first led up on the evening before. "Hendrik," exclaimed Willem, nearly frantic with despair; "what shall we do? Those giraffes are somewhere, and must be found."
Sparks seemed to float before his eyes, and amid these sparks, nebulous and fragmentary visions appeared, visions of his beloved grandmother companioned by scorpions and serpents, in close touch with camelopards and bovine monsters, and, in the last stress of terror and dismay, left entirely dependent upon crustaceans for that help and comfort which hitherto her devoted grandson had ever been thankful to afford.
Twenty zebras displayed their elegant forms and variegated beauty to the eyes of the Roman people. Ten elks, and as many camelopards, the loftiest and most harmless creatures that wander over the plains of Sarmatia and Æthiopia, were contrasted with thirty African hyænas and ten Indian tigers, the most implacable savages of the torrid zone.
It was a country Willem was reluctant to pass rapidly through; for, after leaving it behind, he knew there would be very little hope of again seeing giraffes. Along the way, little groves of the cameel-doorn were occasionally seen; but, for all this, no camelopards.
They knew that fortunes had been made in procuring elephants' tusks, and also that the teeth of the hippopotamus were the finest of ivory, and commanded a price four times greater than any other sent to the European market. But the capturing of the young camelopards was the principal object of their expedition.
Where camelopards are discovered they can easily be run down and shot; but to secure the young unharmed, is a different affair, and an undertaking, which, from Macora's account, promised to occupy all the time that the hunters wished to remain away from Graaf Reinet.
No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs.
He told the judge, in a voice of mingled delight, humility, and triumph, that it was possible he might be guilty of high treason, because he was ignorant of what the crime consisted; but as for stealing two hundred and nineteen Camelopards, he declared that such a larceny was a moral impossibility, because he had never seen one such animal in the whole course of his life.
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