ling his hands and pockets with stones, had advanced
to the support of his now discomfited friend.

"Those brutes don't understand us quite," he said, after the roar of
laughter evoked by this sudden turn in the tide of affairs had subsided.
"One shot would have sent them scampering, but we dared not fire it.
They are not used to the human form divine in this wilderness, but they
won't forget that bombardment in a hurry."

"By Jingo! no. Fancy being obstructed by a herd of monkeys. All the
same, old chap, they did look ugly sitting there champing their tusks at
one like that."

"So they did. Now we'll let our horses drink, and then adjourn to our
sleeping-place. We mustn't camp too near the water, because the
krantzes swarm with tigers [leopards], to say nothing of worse cattle,
who might interfere with us if we kept them from their nightly drink.
And we can't light a fire to-night."

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE.

"A REGION OF EMPTINESS, HOWLING AND DREAR."

Right up under the cliff--the beetling rock overhead, the slope of the
hillside falling away into the basin above described--did our
adventurers make their fireless camp. But though fireless they were
under no lack of ingredients for a substantial meal, nor of the
wherewithal to wash it down satisfactorily; which latter fact was
perhaps the better appreciated from the certainty of this being the last
water they should find until their return.

"Queer thing this sort of contrast, Fanning," said Sellon, who with his
back against the rock was blowing tobacco clouds with post-prandial
contentment. "I suppose some of these evenings, when one gets back into
dress clothes and heavy dinner-parties again, one will look back to this
crouch under a big cliff as a kind of dream."

"I suppose so. Yet man is a would-be adaptable animal, after all. I
remember a chap, an Englishman, who was with me sea-cow shooting up on
the Tonga border. He had an idea of doing at Rome as Romans do, so he
got hold of a Zulu _mutya_ [A kind of apron--pretty scanty in
dimensions. It is usually made of cat-tails and bullock-hide], and cut
about in nothing but that and a pair of canvas shoes. We were after the
hippos in a boat, and it was risky, too--for the river was full of
crocodiles--in case a hippo should tilt us over. Well, before we had
pushed off an hour, the joker was burnt red, and in less than two was
literally skinned alive. He didn't kill any sea-cows that day."

"Batt