Visits 1941-46. [197] After the swarming deer populations of the UP forests, we found the Nepal forests very dull, as deer were almost extinct. – However, there was one interesting exception: the Rhino sanctuary in the Rapti Valley. Here the Maharajah employed a Special service of seventy or eighty game wardens, to prevent rhino being poached and other game killed. In Nepal the rhino was valued for two reasons. First, the horn on the nose was valuable, if not its weight in gold; ay any rate much higher than its weight in silver, as a never-failing aphrodisiac. Secondly, it was valuable for doing a powerful puja. As soon as a rhino was killed, the stomach and intestines were cleaned out leaving a large empty cavity, quite big enough to take a human body. Whoever was going to do the puja then got inside, drank a cup of the rhino's blood, and said a few prayers. This puja guaranteed that at his death all his sins in this life would immediately be forgiven, and he woold go without further delay to the highest heaven.
[197] In this sanctuary of some 200 square miles, on few occasions the Maharajah had a shoot for some ViPs. Kine George V shot there in 1911 and the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow much later- when the tiger and rhino were thinned out to some extent. But in our two trips through this area we saw rhino, tiger and elephant, sometimes at uncomfortably close quarters! One night, when I had a bout of malaria and a temperature of 106 all hell broke loose in the camp, with all the staff yelling, beating tins and lighting fires to drive off a small herd of wild elephants that were invading the camp. On another occasion, and in a different place, an inquisitive rhino on two consecutive nights came up to our tent with grunts and ponderous footsteps, while we were wondering what to do if he blundered into our tent. The next day, when shooting jungle fowl for the pot, I disturbed two rhino and had to climb up a convenient tree out of their way. An hour later a big bull rhino charged my elephant quite unprovoked, which fortunately stood firm, and the rhino shied off at the last instant.
