“The shape is the same with that of a beautiful horse, exact and nicely proportioned, of a bay colour, with a black tail, which in some provinces is long, in others very short; some have long manes hanging to the ground. They are so timorous that they never feed but surrounded with other beasts that defend them.
“Deer and other defenceless animals often herd about the elephant, which, contenting himself with roots and leaves, preserves the beasts that place themselves, as it were, under his protection, from the others that would devour them.”
There is a somewhat doubtful story contained in the Narrative of a Journey from St. Petersburg, in Russia, to Peking, in China, in 1719,[296] to the effect that between Tobolsky and Tomski—
“Our baggage having waited at Tara till our arrival, we left that place on the 18th, and next came to a large Russian village sixty versts from Tara, and the last inhabited by Russians till you pass the Baraba and come to the river Oby.... One of these hunters told me the following story, which was confirmed by several of his neighbours, that in the year 1713, in the month of March, being out a-hunting, he discovered the track of a stag, which he pursued. At overtaking the animal he was somewhat startled on observing it had only one horn, stuck in the middle of its forehead. Being near this village, he drove it home, and showed it, to the great admiration of the spectators. He afterwards killed it, and ate the flesh, and sold the horn to a comb-maker in the town of Tara, for ten alteens, about fifteen pence sterling.
“I inquired carefully about the shape and size of this unicorn, as I shall call it, and was told that it exactly resembled a stag.
“The horn was of a brownish colour, about one archæon or twenty-eight inches long, and twisted from the root till within a finger’s length of the tip, where it was divided, like a fork, into two points, very sharp.”
One of the most trustworthy of observers, the Abbé Huc, speaks very positively on the subject of the unicorn.[297] He says: “The unicorn really exists in Thibet.... We had for a long time a small Mongol Treatise on Natural History, for the use of children, in which a unicorn formed one of the pictorial illustrations.... The Chinese Itinerary says, on the subject of the lake you see before your arrival at Atzder (going from east to west), ‘The unicorn, a very curious animal, is found in the vicinity of this lake, which is forty li long.’”
The unicorn is known in Thibet by the name of serou; in Mongolia, by that of kere; while in a Thibetan manuscript examined by the late Major Lattre, it is called the one-horned tsopo.
Mr. Hazlitt, in his notes appended to the statement by Huc as to the unicorn, states that Mr. Hodgson, of Nepaul, sent to Calcutta the skin and horn of a unicorn that died in the menagerie of the Rajah of Nepaul.
It was described as being very fierce, and abundant in the plains of Tingri, in the southern part of the Thibetan province of Tsang, watered by the Arroun; it assembled round salt beds. The form is graceful, colour reddish, two tufts of hair project from the exterior of each nostril, and there is much down round the hair and mouth. The hair is rough and seems hollow. Doctor Able designated it Antelope Hodgsonii.