outed 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; 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 carcase 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 seen--and thus it ended.

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

VI

AN EARLY CHRISTIAN CEREMONY

Next morning, at the earliest light of dawn, we rose, performed such
ablutions as circumstances would allow, and generally made ready to
start. I am bound to say that when there was sufficient light to enable
us to see each other's faces I, for one, burst out into a roar of
laughter. Job's fat and comfortable countenance was swollen out to
nearly twice its natural size from mosquito bites, and Leo's condition
was not much better. Indeed, of the three I had come off much the best,
probably owing to the toughness of my dark skin, and to the fact that
a good deal of it