Adventure Magazine Cover — page 105: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Out of Date yelling, and fell over one another. Some genius shouted— ‘“‘Put out the fires!”’ Another made up a fire. All the ground seemed to get up and tumble about. And seven donkeys, one mule and two horses stampeding did not quieten things very much. ‘The noise was beyond asylums. Kifaru had brought down one white hunter’s tent in his first rush; the stifled remark from beneath sounded like a distant riot. The other white man, rearing for his rifle, was just in time to see Kifaru tossing the stores piled in front of the tents generously into the night. It sounded not unlike a railway accident. Naturally one case of express rifle car- tridges fell into a fire. It fell from some height and split in halves neatly like a walnut. The fireworks that followed were ‘thrilling, and the vicinity of that fire be- came empty of human beings for quite some considerable radius. Then the one white man under a col- lapsed tent not wriggling like a demon caterpillar put a revolver bullet—38o bore, it was—into Kifaru’s battleship-like stern, and although it did not check that monster’s maneuvering power it hurt his feelings, and he retired into the night, screaming like all the pig pens of the Chicago stockyards, not a snort less. And the only case of medical comforts for one hundred and fifty miles went with him, impaled upon his front horn and scenting the night like a chemist’s shop. Half a mile from the center of tumult Kifaru—whose walk was a Marathon one— stopped in the echoing, immemorial loneli- ness of the wilderness night and got rid of the incubus of the medical case upon a ten-foot ant heap. Thereafter he began supper on a four-inch-thorned mimosa bush, chewing twigs and leaves and thorns with machine-like indifference; but broke off to move out on to the open veld, where he ap- peared to graze, but searched really with his prehensile upper lip, for a very small shrub that usually tickled his mighty palate. Somehow tonight, however, loneliness assailed Kifaru—it can not have been the revolver bullet, becauSe it had in part con- tributed to his attack upon the camp. Nor would anything suffice. He broke off eating to jump into a most unexpectedly easy trot, that became a gallop of equally out—he was. alone. 103 surprizing speed—all simply out of cussed- ness, to upset the stalk of a lion after zebra, he had scented a quarter of a mile away. Yet he had—to his enormous horns this may be attributed—utterly failed to see two hunting-leopards or cheetahs feeding upon a hen ostrich twenty yards from him before he started. The excitement, however, accomplished nothing. The one burst of temper—never sweet at the best of times—had only served to awaken a worse. Kifaru stopped and peered around with his little pig’s eyes and short pig’s tail stuck up at one end as straight as his horns at the other end, and the whole moonlit wonderland became distasteful to him. He, who had lived in this wild place for nobody knows however many years, now felt alone, alone among teeming thousands of feathered and furred wild kindred— alone because he was the only rhinoceros. At least he was the only rhinoceros he had ever met or scented or heard; seeing was out of the question unless they had got within ten or fifteen yards of each other. And in that moment the beast’s effete, prehistoric mind realized the fact that had taken him all those scores of years to find He, R. Bicornts, wanted another R. Bicornis to snort to. Yes, the Wanderlust had him by the throat. He must “‘see behind the ranges’—must. Life in that part now alone was intolerable without a—without a what? Without a Madame R. Bicornis. That wasit. Kifaru was in love, in love with the rhinocerosess he had never seen. And not all the company of all the zebras, all the ostriches, of all the antelopes, gnu, hartebeest, impalla, eland, oribi, water- buck or gazelle after their kind, could suffice, or ever would again. Some of us can sympathize with him; but unlike many who are not rhinoceroses Kifaru at any rate knew what to do—trek! Then he trekked. He trekked northward through the always grim—and at night terrible—thorn bush. The spell of the scene lay heavy upon all things, and the stillness—increased, not broken, by the hundred and one little sounds—was the silence of the world when this antediluvian beast’s ancestors, in com- mon with elephant and hippopotami, had their “day.” Surreptitious rustlings, sud- den, startled crashes, swift patterings, MICLOOOK (C©@ in