We Found The Elephants In Prodigious Numbers On The Southern Bank.
They Come To Drink By Night, And After Having
Slaked their thirst -
in doing which they throw large quantities of water over themselves,
and are heard, while enjoying the
Refreshment, screaming with delight -
they evince their horror of pitfalls by setting off in a straight line
to the desert, and never diverge till they are eight or ten miles off.
They are smaller here than in the countries farther south.
At the Limpopo, for instance, they are upward of twelve feet high;
here, only eleven: farther north we shall find them nine feet only.
The koodoo, or tolo, seemed smaller, too, than those we had been
accustomed to see. We saw specimens of the kuabaoba,
or straight-horned rhinoceros (`R. Oswellii'), which is a variety
of the white (`R. simus'); and we found that, from the horn being
projected downward, it did not obstruct the line of vision,
so that this species is able to be much more wary than its neighbors.
We discovered an entirely new species of antelope, called leche or lechwi.
It is a beautiful water-antelope of a light brownish-yellow color.
Its horns - exactly like those of the `Aigoceros ellipsiprimnus',
the waterbuck, or tumogo, of the Bechuanas - rise from the head with
a slight bend backward, then curve forward at the points. The chest, belly,
and orbits are nearly white, the front of the legs and ankles deep brown.
From the horns, along the nape to the withers, the male has
a small mane of the same yellowish color with the rest of the skin,
and the tail has a tuft of black hair.
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