Last Chance to See

second most common disease in the world after tooth decay?”
    “No, really,” I said.
    “It’s very interesting,” said Mark. “It’s a disease you get from wading through infected water. Tiny snails breed in the water and they act as hosts to tiny parasitic worms that latch on to your skin. When the water evaporates, the worms burrow in and attack your bladder and intestines. You’ll know if you’ve got it, because it’s like really bad flu with diarrhea, and you also piss blood.”
    “I think we’re meant to be keeping quiet,” I said.
    Once we were on the other side of the gully, we regrouped again behind some trees and Charles checked on the wind direction and gave us some further instructions.
    “You need to know something about the way that a rhino sees his world before we go barging into it,” he whispered to us. “They’re pretty mild and inoffensive creatures for all their size and horns and everything. His eyesight is very poor and he only relies on it for pretty basic information. If he sees five animals like us approaching him, he’ll get nervous and run off. So we have to keep close together in single file. Then he’ll think we’re just one animal and he’ll be less worried.”
    “A pretty big animal,” I said.
    “That doesn’t matter. He’s not afraid of big animals, but numbers bother him. We also have to stay downwind of him, which means that from here we’re going to have to make a wide circle around him. His sense of smell is very acute indeed. In fact, it’s his most important sense. His whole world picture is made up of smells. He ‘sees’ in smells. His nasal passages are in fact bigger than his brain.”
    From here it was at last possible to discern the creature with the naked eye. We were a bit more than half a mile from it. It was standing out in the open, looking, at moments when it was completely still, like a large outcrop of rock. From time to time its long sloping head would wave gently from side to side and its horns would bob slightly up and down as, mildly and inoffensively, it cropped the grass. This was not a termite hill.
    We set off again, very quietly, constantly stopping, ducking, and shifting our position to try and stay downwind of the creature, while the wind, which didn’t care one way or the other, constantly shifted its position too. At last we made it to another small clump of trees about a hundred yards from the creature, which so far had seemed to be undisturbed by our approach. From here, though, it was just open ground between us and it. We stayed here for a few minutes to watchand photograph it. If any closer approach did in fact scare it off, then this was our last opportunity. The animal was turned slightly away from us, continuing gently to crop the grass. At last the wind was well established in our favour and, nervously, quietly, we set off again.
    It was a little like that game we play as children, in which one child stands facing the wall while the others try to creep up behind and touch her. She will from time to time suddenly turn around, and anyone she catches moving has to go all the way to the back and start again. Generally she won’t be in a position to impale anyone she doesn’t like the look of on a three-foot-horn, but in other respects it was similar.
    The animal is, of course, a herbivore. It lives by grazing. The closer we crept to it, and the more monstrously it loomed in front of us, the more incongruous its gentle activity seemed to be. It was like watching an excavating machine quietly getting on with a little weeding.
    At about forty yards’ distance, the rhinoceros suddenly stopped eating and looked up. It turned slowly to look at us and regarded us with grave suspicion while we tried very hard to look like the smallest and most inoffensive animal we could possibly be. It watched us carefully but without apparent comprehension, its small black eyes peering dully at us from either side of its horn. You can’t help but try and follow an animal’s thought processes, and you can’t help, when faced with an animal like a three-ton rhinoceros with nasal passages bigger than its brain, but fail.
    The world of smells is now virtually closed to modern man. Not that we haven’t got a sense of smell—we sniff our food or wine, we occasionally smell a flower, and can usually tell if there’s a gas leak—but generally it’s all a bit of a blur, and often an irrelevant or bothersome blur at that. When we read that