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Return of the Black Rhino

by Rick Bass

With a little help from some friends, a rare and magnificent beast makes a comeback.

It is the oldest desert in the world, a garden of burned and blackened-red basalt that spilled out of the earth 130 million years ago in southwest Africa, hardening to form the arid landscape of Namibia, the driest country south of the Sahara.

Black rhinos blossomed from African ground some four million years ago. Maybe this difference -- the 126-million-year wait between the two events -- is how long it takes to construct from dust and wind and a dab of rain, and from that other, last thing, spirit, a rhino. There is no other flowering of which I am aware, no iris nor orchid, as convoluted and specific and fantastically beautiful as the rhino, no pollinating moth whose desire is as elegantly fitted to its flower as the black rhino is to the landscape of northwest Namibia, known as the Kunene region.

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posted by ... @ 11:47 AM