A Tale Of Three Lions Read Free Page A

was very
sparse, and only grew about in clumps, while here and there were single flat-
topped mimosa-trees. To our right a little stream, which had cut a deep
channel for itself in the bosom of the slope, flowed musically on between
banks green with maidenhair, wild asparagus, and many beautiful grasses. The
bed-rock here was red granite, and in the course of centuries of patient
washing the water had hollowed out some of the huge slabs in its path into
great troughs and cups, and these we used for bathing-places. No Roman lady,
with her baths of porphyry or alabaster, could have had a more delicious spot
to bathe herself than we found within fifty yards of our skerm, or rough
inclosure of mimosa thorn, that we had dragged together round the cart to
protect us from the attacks of lions. That there were several of these brutes
about, I knew from their spoor, though we had neither heard nor seen
them.
    “Our bath was a little nook where the eddy of the stream had washed away a
mass of soil, and on the edge of it there grew a most beautiful old mimosa
thorn. Beneath the thorn was a large smooth slab of granite fringed all round
with maidenhair and other ferns, that sloped gently down to a pool of the
clearest sparkling water, which lay in a bowl of granite about ten feet wide
by five feet deep in the centre. Here to this slab we went every morning to
bathe, and that delightful bath is among the most pleasant of my hunting
reminiscences, as it is also, for reasons which will presently appear, among
the most painful.
    “It was a lovely night. Harry and I sat to the windward of the fire, where
the two Kaffirs were busily employed in cooking some impala steaks off a buck
which Harry, to his great joy, had shot that morning, and were as perfectly
contented with ourselves and the world at large as two people could possibly
be. The night was beautiful, and it would require somebody with more words on
the tip of his tongue than I have to describe properly the chastened majesty
of those moonlit wilds. Away for ever and for ever, away to the mysterious
north, rolled the great bush ocean over which the silence brooded. There
beneath us a mile or more to the right ran the wide Oliphant, and mirror-
like flashed back the moon, whose silver spears were shivered on its breast,
and then tossed in twisted lines of light far and wide about the mountains
and the plain. Down upon the river-banks grew great timber-trees that through
the stillness pointed solemnly to Heaven, and the beauty of the night lay
upon them like a cloud. Everywhere was silence—silence in the starred
depths, silence on the bosom of the sleeping earth. Now, if ever, great
thoughts might rise in a man’s mind, and for a space he might forget his
littleness in the sense that he partook of the pure immensity about him.
    “‘Hark! what was that?’
    “From far away down by the river there comes a mighty rolling sound, then
another, and another. It is the lion seeking his meat.
    “I saw Harry shiver and turn a little pale. He was a plucky boy enough,
but the roar of a lion heard for the first time in the solemn bush veldt at
night is apt to shake the nerves of any lad.
    “‘Lions, my boy,’ I said; ‘they are hunting down by the river there; but I
don’t think that you need make yourself uneasy. We have been here three
nights now, and if they were going to pay us a visit I think that they would
have done so before this. However, we will make up the fire.’
    “‘Here, Pharaoh, do you and Jim-Jim get some more wood before we go to
sleep, else the cats will be purring round you before morning.’
    “Pharaoh, a great brawny Swazi, who had been working for me at Pilgrims’
Rest, laughed, rose, and stretched himself, then calling to Jim-Jim to bring
the axe and a reim, started off in the moonlight towards a clump of
sugar-bush where we cut our fuel from some dead trees. He was a fine fellow
in his way, was Pharaoh, and I