Adventure Magazine Cover — page 109: what you’re looking at

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

Out of Date Of course Kifaru was not red really. He was black-gray; but he had been wallowing in red clay in a pond of that red land, and, as if his own thick skin were not enough, had plastered himself with an armor coat- ing of the landscape, so to speak. Scarcely of this age, and hardly beautiful at any time, Kifaru now resembled more than ever some terrific prehistoric beast of the - Tertiary Age, which in fact was just what he was. The moon slipped above the crest of that hill, which had been a volcano once, and lighted a weird path full of flitting tiny khpsringer antelopes, bouncing like chamois from rock to rock on their toes like very spirits of the place, as Kifaru climbed. Far up, half an hour before, a lion had flung forth his deep, coughing bass thunder; and the rhinoceros met the royal pair now, slouching down to the plains to make their kill. His short-sighted eyes may not have seen, though certainly his wonderful nose did not fail toscent them, but he never turned aside. He never swerved, hesitated nor faltered. It was the lions who had to do that or be trodden upon—growling and snarling hor- ribly, as do all tyrants when they have to give way. One lion even made a gripping pass at him with his great paw when he had gone by, but Kifaru spun, literally spun, around in his stride with such surprizing agility and readiness that King Leo thought it prudent to go on downhill. Anon Kifaru came to a track beaten flat on the steep ascent. He stopped for a moment and looked—if he could see— down upon the wilderness spread in the moonlight at his feet. Then, following the path, he climbed again. Evidently that path had not been made in a day, or a year, or a century even. Kifaru, for that is known for certain, may have climbed it on the day Queen Victoria ascended the throne; and it was old, old, then. Only rhinoceroses could have beaten a track pavement flat like that— rhinoceroses or elephants, and considerably more than one, too. At that elevation, though within a few miles of the equator, it was cold, almost frosty. Heather, bramble and bracken grew at every turn. It might have been a scene in the Scotch Highlands if Kifaru had not continued climbing till all vegetation stopped and there were only the naked 107 boulders and the lip of the extinct crater atop, when it might have been a scene in the moon—but for the noise. And the noise was over the lip of the crater. And it was the most extraordinary din one ever heard or dreamed of, And it made Kifaru stop as he topped the crest, stop short and listen, rigid, carven, mon- strous, grotesque. oie because he was so beastly near- sighted. What he heard and smelled was quite enough for his ears and nose, sharp even for a citizen of Nature. There was the crater—the moon showed it—stark and cold and naked—indecently bold, horribly crude. There was a pool of water—but it really looked like molten silver in that light—filling the bottom of the crater. There was the blue-black, velvet sky and a round hole to let the light in. And that was all. At least, it was all the human eye took in at first. After a time it occurred to one that the sloping sides of that amphitheater were not sloping sides at all, but rhinocer- oses’ backs! The ground they were slowly treading into a pavement was hidden be- neath their bodies. No man knoweth—not even the Wander- obo, who are the wildest hunting savages in Africa—how many rhinoceroses there were there, and to guess were absurd. All the rhinoceroses for very many, many square miles around, at any rate. Kifaru himself had come thirty miles from the river, alone; and there were others—but never mind. The map, and all natives, said this was a district without water—but perhaps the Wanderobo knew. Anyway one might have passed the volcano a few hundred yards on the other side and never guessed what a natural reservoir of clear water there was over the lip. But that was only a side count. What did matter was the rhino. All patterns and makes and shapes and plans of rhinoceros were there in that elemental place. Rhino there were, low and of great length; leggy rhino, rhino fat and tubby; rhino with front horns aspiring for records; rhino with back horns longest; rhino with both horns equal, with long thin horns, short stubby horns, sharp horns, blunt horns, malformed horns, three I DO not know what Kifaru saw, cComiclool (©