and
birds, and the weird calling of natives across the valleys. Far out
towards the sea a thunderstorm flashed; and after a long interval the
rumblings came to us. So very distant was it that we paid it little
attention, save as an interesting background to our own still evening.
Almost between sentences of our slow conversation, however, it rushed up
to the zenith, blotting out the stars. The tall palms began to sway and
rustle in the forerunning breeze. Then with a swoop it was upon us, a
tempest of fury. We turned in; and all night long the heavy deluges of
rain fell, roaring like surf on an unfriendly coast.

By morning this had fallen to a light, steady drizzle in which we
started off quite happily. In this climate one likes to get wet. The
ground was sodden and deep with muck. Within a mile of camp we saw many
fresh buffalo tracks.

This time we went downhill and still downhill through openings among
batches of great forest trees. The new leaves were just coming out in
pinks and russets, so that the effect at a little distance was almost
precisely that of our autumn foliage in its duller phases. So familiar
were made some of the low rounded knolls that for an instant we were
respectively back in the hills of Surrey or Michigan, and told each
other so.

Thus we moved slowly out from the dense cover to the grass openings. Far
over on another ridge F. called my attention to something jet-black and
indeterminate. In another country I should have named it as a charred
log on an old pine burning, for that was precisely what it looked like.
We glanced at it casually through our glasses. It was a sable buck lying
down right out in the open. He was black and sleek, and we could make
out his sweeping scimitar horns.

Memba Sasa and the Swahili dropped flat on their faces while F. and I
crawled slowly and cautiously through the mud until we had gained the
cover of a shallow ravine that ran in the beast's general direction.
Noting carefully a certain small thicket as landmark, we stooped and
moved as fast as we could down to that point of vantage. There we
cautiously parted the grasses and looked. The sable had disappeared. The
place where he had been lying was plainly to be identified, and there
was no cover save a tiny bush between two and three feet high. We were
quite certain he had neither seen nor winded us. Either he had risen
and fled forward into the ravine up which we had made our stalk, or else
he had entered