A HORSE IN TROPICAL AFRICA.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 360, 17 April 1889, Page 3

A HORSE IN TROPICAL AFRICA.

Several incidents of recent African exploration call to mind the stories that were told of the early travels of white men in this country. A white man on horseback is a very unusual spectacle in ti-opical Africa, and the animal Mr Hodister rode a few months ago made almost as much of a sensation as the horses that Cortez introduced into Mexico. Hodister's journey was a short one, extending only from Landana on the coasb to Boma, on the Congo, but ib led the traveller through a densely-peopled region of which little is yet known. 'My hor?e,' he writes, 'niide a great sensation. At sight of him all the women in the villages atfiist were petiified with astonishment. They stood motionlc°s with their eyes fixed on the strange-looking animal. Coming to themselves at last, with their hands raised above (.heir heads, they raised their cry of " Ho, ho, lie ! " expiessive of tDoundless astonishment. Some of them threw themselves upon the ground, smiting their breasts. Could it be, they said, that such a great bea*t, with a man above him, was harmless ? Such an animal must certaidly eat black people. * When we convinced them at laso that the horse was harmless and that he was a very useful animal, they ventured nearer. They had no eyes for any tiling bin the horse. As we pa=sed through the villages many of the inhabitants followed us. The men turned back after a mile or .so bub many of the women, who showed the greatest interest and curiosity, followed us for three miles. When my horse trotted they trotted too, their eyes fixed 0:1 the beast. Unmindful of where they were step ping they fell into the furrows in the manioc fields, and tumbled down in the tall grass. They kept pointing the animal out to the babies that were fastened on their backs. From some of the villages deputations came to me asking me to stop awhile in their towns that they might have time to admire the prod iffy.' A whole menagerie of African curiosities would not excite so much attention in the civilised world a? this horse aion^ed .n a part of Afrfca where the zebra never roams ! and no species of the horse family is known. — N.Y. 'Sun.'