"Oh! ... I ... _say_! ... I thought those were great tree trunks till they moved, but ... they’re..." "They’re _giraffes_, by Jove! I wonder whether I ought to bring one down? Better not ... might delay us ... and I don’t know how the natives ’ud take it...." A herd of six or seven stately giraffes suspended their browsing on the upper branches of an acacia tree, and gazed at them with their liquid eyes, flicking their satiny bodies with tails that terminated in large black tassels. "O-oh!’" came from Lucy, as she reined in her donkey. "_Look_ at those things over there! Like houses or great rocks, but they’re moving too!" She pointed with her riding whip to some grey bulks in the middle distance which, as they swished through the herbage, showed here and there a gleam of polished tusks. "Shoot! Master, shoot!" exclaimed the Wanyamwezi.... "Elephants, Master!" But Roger called for silence and held his hand. Supposing the elephants charged down on Lucy? And then he did not know how the sounds of guns would be received in this new country, what the unknown natives might think, and lastly, perhaps there was beginning to dawn on him an appreciation of what this spectacle meant: a piece of absolutely unspoiled Africa, not yet ravaged by the white man or the native hunter, armed with the white man’s weapons. His caravan had plenty of dried meat. They should not break the charm of the Happy Valley—the phrase came suddenly into his mind, some dim remembrance of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s ponderous romance. As they advanced northwards the scenes grew more idyllic. Herds of gnus, hartebeests, elands, and zebras, intermingled with reed buck and impala, alternately stared in immobility, then dashed off in clouds of yellow dust, and once more stood at gaze. Gazelles with glossy black, annulated horns and bodies brilliant in colour—golden-red, black-banded, and snowy-white below—cropped the turf a few yards from the faintly marked track which the caravan was following; and though the bucks lifted their heads to observe this advancing file of human beings they scarcely moved away more than a few yards.