Crash Course in Zoology

In the 3,100-mile East African Safari, it helps if a driver knows his zoology. Cows confronted by cars act plain stupid: they have to be bumpered off the road. Sheep and goats scatter at the first toot. Elephants are cops, happily waving on traffic with their trunks. Rhinos just charge. Gazelles, zebras and wildebeests are timorous but hardheaded: if a car gets between them and their water hole, adieu auto! As for the little creatures--like 150-lb. wart hogs--a driver can only keep his fingers crossed. "They're impossible to see until you hit them," explained TIME Stringer Henry Reuter, whose Singer Vogue bogged out after 190 miles last week. "But boy, do they make a mess!"

Together & Up! In the classic tradition of auto racing, the Safari ends where it begins. From Nairobi, through Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania and back to the Kenyan capital, there are 78 check points, and entrants are chaperoned like a seventh-grade dance.

Few cars can survive a route that meanders all the way from mushy beaches to 12,000-ft.-high hairpins, from riverbeds to swamps. The surface is often black-cotton soil that turns to treacle at the first trace of rain. A worse, all-weather hazard comes in the form of mud or rock walls dumped across roads by enterprising tribesmen, who live all year on the fees they earn for removing them. "In Kenya," says one old African hand, "Harambee is a national motto. It means 'Let's all push together.' The trouble is that half the blighters are pushing the car while the other half are pushing up the price."

Cool & Condescending. Last week's 85 contestants had hardly roared away from the starting line when three factory-backed Citroens were penalized for exceeding Nairobi's posted speed limit of 30 m.p.h. Outside city limits, nature took over. A Peugeot had a headlight demolished by a spleenful buffalo; another car hit a giraffe. Britain's Stirling Moss, essaying a backwoods comeback after the near-fatal accident that forced his retirement from the Grand Prix circuit three years ago, condescended to navigate for Brother-in-Law Erik Carlsson, and lost him cold--amid hot argument--somewhere west of Suez. Stirling's sister, Pat Moss Carlsson, was running second when she tried to overtake a truck in her Swedish Saab. The truck was disinclined; Pat was dislocated.

As the Safari churned to a close, faint clanking noises were still heard from 16 cars--some from Europeans desperately attempting repairs. They shouldn't have bothered. In twelve years, no non-African has ever won, and the record may forever be intact. Last week's winners came close to denting it: two Sikh brothers named Joginder and Jaswant Singh, in their secondhand Swedish Volvo with 50,000 miles on the odometer. Of course, they have lived all their lives in Nairobi. When they coasted cozily home, the swinging Singhs were hoisted onto the roof of their car and paraded through the streets. It was the worst hazard they had faced.

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