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Updated: July 7, 2025
Two minutes more and the Hottentot was on the horse, galloping away in the direction given to him. Having satisfied their hunger, thanked their host and his fat vrow for their hospitality, and bidden them farewell, our adventurers started off for the South, anxious to rejoin Hans, and continue the search after the giraffes.
Darbyshire; it seemed so strange to find such a foreign little person with such a distinctly English name. She, however, refused to be beguiled away by St. Nivel to look at the giraffes. I think she began to smell more than a rat when we reached the monkey house, and to doubt whether his attentions to her were as disinterested as they appeared, especially when she heard that I was his cousin.
"Giraffes drinking at the fountain pools, Trafalgar Square," was one of the most notable and characteristic of his studies, while even more sensational was the gruesome picture of "Vultures attacking dying camel in Upper Berkeley Street."
In it there were more than twenty elephants, giraffes, hippopotami, rhinoceroses, zebras, dromedaries, camels, and the rarest kinds of antelopes. Then came the reptiles, from the boa constrictor, who was ten yards long, to the smallest blind-worm, amongst them some of the most dangerous kinds. Crocodiles twenty feet long, monstrous toads, tortoises as big as donkeys.
The menagerie, though the ostensible staple of the gardens, is rather poor and scanty; pretty well provided with lions and lionesses, also one or two giraffes, some camels, a polar bear, who plunged into a pool of water for bits of cake, and two black bears, who sat on their haunches or climbed poles; besides a wilderness of monkeys, some parrots and macaws, an ostrich, various ducks, and other animal and ornithological trumpery; some skins of snakes so well stuffed that I took them for living serpents till J discovered the deception, and an aquarium, with a good many common fishes swimming among sea-weed.
So wonderfully did the giraffes blend with the bark and foliage of the trees, that, although the hunters passed close by, they were unable to find them. Little did they think while moving cautiously along that the very animals they were looking for were silently watching them, with gentle eyes, from between the branches of trees quite close to them.
The palæotherium and the deinoceras, the mastodon and the mammoth, the huge giraffes and antelopes of sunnier times, succeed to the ancestral kangaroos and wombats of the secondary strata.
Buffaloes and giraffes were flying together, all fancying that they were escaping a common danger, while rushing on to destruction. At last the hedges of the hopo were reached, and on the outer side numerous hunters were stationed, shouting, and shrieking, and shaking their spears and shields, still further to increase the confusion of the terror-stricken animals.
As the fly vanished, the giraffes also left the neighbourhood.
Isolated from all the remainder of the earth about the beginning of the tertiary epoch, long before the mammoth and the mastodon had yet dreamt of appearing upon the stage of existence, long before the first shadowy ancestor of the horse had turned tail on nature's rough draft of the still undeveloped and unspecialised lion, long before the extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish elks and colossal giraffes of late tertiary times had even begun to run their race on the broad plains of Europe and America, the Australian continent found itself at an early period of its development cut off entirely from all social intercourse with the remainder of our planet, and turned upon itself, like the German philosopher, to evolve its own plants and animals out of its own inner consciousness.
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