Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 24, 2025
We had a delightful picnic, and my guests greatly enjoyed their night in the open, although one of them got rather a bad fright from a rhino which suddenly snorted close to our camp, evidently very annoyed at our intrusion on his domain. In the morning they went off as soon as it was light to try their luck along the river, while I remained in camp to see to breakfast.
The horses were pulled, all standing, one way and another. Rolls of film were exposed and replaced by fresh ones. The rhino sulked and stormed and charged in turn. At the end of the fourth hour Loveless had one short length of light line left. The rest of the ropes were dangling, broken, from the rhino's legs and neck as he stood at bay over the ruins of the ant-hill.
"Why, out to the East Indies, to be sure that's the land, I've heard, of gold and silver and jewels. We shall all come back with our pockets well lined with the rhino. Lots of prize-money, lad that's the stuff we want. No wonder our skipper is in a hurry to be off.
Once he had courted popularity; presently this coming after his re-election to a sixth term he went out of his way to win unpopularity. His invectives ate in like corrosives, his metaphors bit like adders. Always he had been like a sponge to sop up adulation; now he was to prove that when it came to withstanding denunciation his hide was the hide of a rhino.
I had eaten nothing since five o'clock in the morning, my water bottle was so nearly empty that I dared take only a swallow at a time, my knees were sore from climbing hills and wading through the tall, dry prairie grass, and I decided to give up this endless pursuit of a rhino who wouldn't die after being hit with four cordite shells.
The Colonel retreated halfway down the hill and fired two shots from his revolver. Somewhere beyond our range of vision we heard the two shots repeated, and at the end of a little more than half an hour all the members of the drive were gathered on the hillside below the crest. Then the Colonel explained the reason for his signal. The rhino was not there. We might still find him, and we might not.
"He ain't goin' to try no flapdoodles with us," was the quick answer. "Well, if he knows when he's well off," the first voice resumed, "he'll come round with the rhino mighty quick, an' give us no more trouble." "I kin see us livin' like gent'men, a'ready."
The district commissioner at Embo told me that he had been ordered to reduce the number of rhinos in his district in the interest of public safety and that he had killed thirty-five in all. Out of this number five charged him. That would indicate that one rhino in seven will charge.
They had also sold three rhinoceros horns, as well as stones from the gall-bladder and intestines of monkeys and the big porcupine, all valuable in the Chinese pharmacopoea. Each kilogram of rhino horn may fetch f. 140. These articles are dispensed for medical effect by scraping off a little, which is taken internally with water.
The reason was supplied by a rhino that came grunting to his feet about seventy yards away. He had not seen me, and he had not smelled me, but the general disturbance of all these events had broken into his early morning nap. He looked to me like a person who is cross before breakfast, so I ducked low and ran around him.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking