A TALE OF THREE LIONS
Page: 10

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,