ill,
be it noted that, if I did not jump down, no other man there that night
had sufficient manhood remaining to venture the opportunity.

My heart glowed as I watched her. She picked a bone from the litter on
the pavement and beat off its head by blows against the wall. Then with
her teeth she fashioned the point to still further sharpness. I could
see her teeth glisten white in the moonrays as she bit with them.

The huge cave-tigers, which stood as high as her head as they walked,
came nearer to her in their prowlings, yet obviously neglected her. This
was part of their accustomed scheme of torment, and the woman knew it
well. There was something intolerable in their noiseless, ceaseless
paddings over the pavement. I could see the prisoner's breast heave as
she watched them. A terror such as that would have made many a victim
sick and helpless.

But this one was bolder than I had thought. She did not wait for a
spring: she made the first attack herself. When the she-tiger made its
stroll towards her, and was in the act of turning, she flung herself
into a sudden leap, striking viciously at its eye with her sharpened
bone. A roar from the onlookers acknowledged the stroke. The
cave-tiger's eye remained undarkened, but the puny weapon had dealt it
a smart flesh wound, and with a great bellow of surprise and pain it
scampered away to gain space for a rush and a spring.

But the woman did not await its charge. With a shrill scream she sped
forward, running at the full of her speed across the moonlight directly
towards that shadowed part of the encircling wall within whose thickness
I had my gazing place; and then, throwing every tendon of her body into
the spring, made the greatest leap that surely any human being
ever accomplished, even when spurred on by the utmost of terror and
desperation. In an after day I measured it, and though of a certainty
she must have added much to the tally by the sheer force of her run,
which drove her clinging up the rough surface of the wall, it is a sure
thing that in that splendid leap her feet must have dangled a man-height
and a half above the pavement.

I say it was prodigious, but then the spur was more than the ordinary,
and the woman herself was far out of the common both in thews and
intelligence; and the end of the leap left her with five fingers lodged
in the sill of the arrow-slit from which I watched. Even then she must
have slipped back if she had been left to herself,