第22章

"What is it?" asked I.

"It is those damned lions, sir," answered Job, in a tone which was an odd mixture of a sense of personal injury, habitual respect, and acknowledged fear, "and they are swimming here to heat us," he added, nervously picking up an "h" in his agitation.

I looked again, there was no doubt about it; I could catch the glare of their ferocious eyes.Attracted either by the smell of the newly killed water buck meat or of ourselves, the hungry beasts were actually storming our position.

Leo already had his rifle in his hand.I called to him to wait till they were nearer, and meanwhile grabbed my own.Some fifteen feet from us the water shallowed on a bank to the depth of about fifteen inches, and presently the first of themit was the lionessgot on to it and shook herself and roared.At that moment Leo fired, and the bullet went right down her open mouth and out at the back of her neck, and down she dropped, with a splash, dead.The other liona full-grown malewas some two paces behind her.At this second he got his forepaws on to the bank, when a strange thing happened.There was a rush and disturbance of the water, such as one sees in a pond in England when a pike takes a little fish, only a thousand times fiercer and larger, and suddenly the lion gave a most terrific snarling roar and sprang forward on to the bank, dragging something black with him.

"Allah!" shouted Mahomed, "a crocodile has got him by the leg!" and sure enough he had.We could see the long snout with its gleaming lines of teeth and the reptile body behind it.

And then followed an extraordinary scene, indeed.The lion managed to get well on to the bank, the crocodile half standing and half swimming, still nipping his hind-leg.He roared till the air quivered with the sound, and then, with a savage, shrieking snarl, turned round and clawed hold of the crocodile's head.

The crocodile shifted his grip, having, as we afterwards discovered, had one of his eyes torn out, and slightly turned over, and instantly the lion got him by the throat and held on, and then over and over they rolled upon the bank, struggling hideously.It was impossible to follow their movements, but when next we got a clear view the tables had turned, for the crocodile, whose head seemed to be a mass of gore, had got the lion's body in his iron jaws just above the hips, and was squeezing him and shaking him to and fro.For his part the tortured brute, roaring in agony, was clawing and biting madly at his enemy's scaly head, and fixing his great hind claws in the crocodile's, comparatively speaking, soft throat, ripping it open as one would rip a glove.

Then, all of a sudden, the end came.The lion's head fell forward on the crocodile's back, and with an awful groan he died, and the crocodile, after standing for a minute motionless, slowly rolled over on to his side, his jaws still fixed across the carcass of the lion, which we afterwards found he had bitten almost in halves.

This duel to the death was a wonderful and a shocking sight, and one that I suppose few men have seenand thus it ended.

When it was all over, leaving Mahomed to keep a lookout, we managed to spend the rest of the night as quietly as the mosquitoes would allow.