Lore of the Unicorn

This clue is found in a book packed with unheard-of matters and quite worthy of its noble title: Historia de los Grandes y Remotos Reynos de la Etiopia, Monarchia del Emperador llamado Preste Juan. Well beyond the middle of it there is a clear description of the rhinoceros, which Fray Luis says has been made familiar to Europe by many pictures. He describes it as an extremely wild animal, very fierce and brave and proud, and so powerful that it can be killed only by one ruse or trick. The way of killing it is this: The hunters go into the province of Goyame, which is at the base of the Mountains of the Moon whence the Nile springs, for there alone, in all Africa, are these beasts to be found. When they learn that one is near at hand they load their muskets and they take a female monkey which they have trained for this kind of hunting, and they bring her to the place. She begins at once to run about looking for the rhinoceros, and when she sees him she leaps here and there and dances as she goes toward him, playing a thousand monkey-tricks. He is much delighted in watching this entertainment, so that she is able to approach until she can throw one leg over his back. Then she begins scratching and rubbing his hide, and this gives him keen pleasure. At last, jumping to the ground again, she starts to rub his belly, and then the rhinoceros is so overcome with ecstasy that he stretches himself out at length upon the ground. At this point the hunters, who have been hidden all the while in some safe place, come up with their cross-bows or muskets and shoot him.

Here is such a tale as hunters may have told round the camp-fire, time out of mind, as a matter-of-fact statement of the method by which a valuable animal, too tough for darts and arrows, might be killed. One who lays the two side by side will have little doubt, I think, that the tale reported by Fray Luis springs from the same root as the virgin-capture story, for they correspond not merely here and there but at every point. With regard to the question as to which of the two is probably the older, one sees that Fray Luis's relation, as compared with the other, verges everywhere toward the probable, even the realistic. Instead of the unicorn we have here the rhinoceros, his grossly actual doppelganger. In place of the virgin we are given a monkey--a female monkey, be it observed, and one specially trained in the appropriate feminine blandishments. Instead of depending upon such vague lures as the odour of chastity or the power of the eye, this decoy sets to work with seduction of the most physical kind. Instead of the sleep of the unicorn, which is usually left unexplained by the narrators of the other tale, we have here the natural stretching-out of the beast to enjoy itself to the fullest extent.

Now it seems unlikely that this account is a degraded or brokendown version of the virgin-capture story. Usually, when a myth or legend has reached such an elevation of the supernatural as that attained by the virgin-capture tale, it maintains itself at that level, if only because simple minds find it easier to remember and perhaps easier to believe. This rule--which has, of course, many exceptions--holds particularly for myths and legends that have become entangled with religious beliefs. Numerous written texts of the virgin-capture story, and very numerous representations of it, have existed for a long time to preserve it from corrupting influences. The variations from that story in the account of the rhinoceros hunt, moreover, are not of a sort to be accounted for by assuming a gradual decomposition of the Christian tale as it was tossed from tongue to tongue during the centuries. The two stories answer to each other point for point, so that one who tried to prove that the monkey-capture is a debased version of the virgin-capture story would be obliged to assume a conscious act of euhemerization for which he could scarcely assign a sufficient motive. But the most cogent argument against such a theory is the vaguest and the hardest to state: such a patient unravelling of a developed legend and the substitution, strand by strand, of baser materials, is simply foreign to the thought-habits of the times and the minds concerned. Such cynical performances are amusing to a Lucian or an Anatole France, but we cannot attribute them to African hunters of the seventeenth or of any earlier century. And this tale of the rhinoceros hunt is a hunter's tale. As such, it is probably ancient, for during historic times the rhinoceros of India--where the story first was told--was captured chiefly by great drives, such as that organized by Tamerlane in the fourteenth century, in which hundreds of men took part on foot and horseback.