Five weeks later, the Red Sea was very hot, and everybody took off all the clothes they had. The Parsee took off his hat; but the Rhinoceros took off his skin and carried it over his shoulder as he came down to the beach to bathe. In those days it buttoned underneath with three buttons and looked like a waterproof. He said nothing about the Parsee’s cake. The Rhinoceros waddled straight into the water and blew bubbles through his nose. His skin was on the beach.

Presently the Parsee came by and found the skin. He smiled, and the smile ran all round his face two times. Then he danced three times round the skin and rubbed his hands. Then he went to his camp and filled his hat with cake-crumbs[11]. You know, the Parsee never ate anything but cake, and never swept out his camp. He took that skin, and he shook that skin, and he scrubbed that skin, and he rubbed that skin just as full of old, dry, stale, tickly cake-crumbs and some burned currants. Then he climbed to the top of his palm-tree and waited.

The Rhinoceros came out of the water and put it on. He buttoned it up with the three buttons, and it tickled like cake-crumbs in bed. Then he wanted to scratch, but that made it worse[12]. Then he lay down on the sands and rolled and rolled and rolled, and every time he rolled the cake-crumbs tickled him worse and worse and worse.

Then he ran to the palm-tree and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed himself against it. He rubbed so much and so hard that he rubbed his skin into a great fold over his shoulders, and another fold underneath. He rubbed some more folds over his legs. But it didn’t work. The cake-crumbs were inside his skin and they tickled. So he went home, very angry indeed and horribly scratchy.

From that day to this every rhinoceros has great folds in his skin and a very bad temper, because he has many cake-crumbs inside.

Once upon a time, the Leopard lived in a place called the High Veldt. There were sand and sandy-coloured rock and tufts of sandy-yellowish grass in that place. The Giraffe and the Zebra and the Eland and the Koodoo and the Hartebeest lived there. They were exclusively sandy-yellow-brownish all over; but the Leopard was the exclusivest sandiest-yellowish-brownest of them all. He was the greyish-yellowish catty-shaped beast in that place. This was very bad for the Giraffe and the Zebra and the rest of them, because he liked to lie down by a yellowish-greyish-brownish stone or clump of grass, and when the Giraffe or the Zebra or the Eland or the Koodoo or the Bush-Buck or the Bonte-Buck came by he jumped and caught them. He did so! And, also, there was an Ethiopian with bows and arrows (a exclusively greyish-brownish-yellowish man), who lived on the High Veldt with the Leopard. The two hunted together – the Ethiopian with his bows and arrows, and the Leopard exclusively with his teeth and claws – till the Giraffe and the Eland and the Koodoo and the Quagga and all the rest of them didn’t know which way to jump. They didn’t indeed!

After a long time, the animals learned to avoid anything that looked like a Leopard or an Ethiopian. And bit by bit[13] (the Giraffe began it, because his legs were the longest) they went away from the High Veldt. They scuttled for days and days and days till they came to a great forest, exclusively full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly shadows, and there they hid.

After another long time, the Giraffe grew blotchy, and the Zebra grew stripy, and the Eland and the Koodoo grew darker, with little wavy grey lines on their backs like bark on a tree trunk. Though you could hear them and smell them, you could very seldom see them: only when you knew precisely where to look. They had a beautiful time in that forest, while the Leopard and the Ethiopian were puzzled. Where are their breakfasts and their dinners? At last the Leopard and the Ethiopian were so hungry that they ate rats and beetles and rock-rabbits. And they both had a terrible stomach-ache.