“Ah! there is nothing like meat for medicine, after all. It makes a man look kinder towards his fellows, and if he has his stomach full there is nought that he cannot bear. If I had always plenty of meat in me I would as soon fight a leopard every day as not; and if I had a good knife I would be willing to fight a lion rather than run away from him.”
Such sentiments, noble and worthy of the great man who spoke them, met with hearty approbation from his repleted friends, and Moto was of the opinion that after a stomachful of good meat he might also, if hard pressed, do damage to either a leopard or a lion. Selim, following suit, suggested that he, being but a boy, ought to have his English gun in his hand before he could be expected to fight a lion or a leopard; while Abdullah and Niani gravely expressed their fears that if they met either of those beasts of prey they would think of climbing some tall tree before doing anything else.
Kalulu, after skinning the leopard, proceeded to spread the hide out on a piece of spongy sward for the sun to dry it, putting a number of small pegs around to stretch it. The leopard, being denuded of his splendid dress, was not so much an object of fear to little Niani as it had been; it was no more fearful than a skinned dog would have been, though the canine teeth still looked formidable. But knowing the injury it had caused Simba during life, he could not help seizing the broken spear-shaft, and belabouring the dead brute with it in a vicious manner, which no doubt the leopard would have resented, could he have felt the blows showered on him. Having taken his fill of this mild revenge, Niani seized it by the tail and dragged it far out of sight.
The valley wherein these adventures occurred would have been deemed by our friends exceedingly pretty at any other season, but almost every other moment the wind drifted great dense masses of rain-cloud across its face, which completely blurred its beauty, and added more volume to the streams that constantly poured down the slopes from above.
Safe, however, for the time under their shed, they could contemplate their little annoyances with liberal philosophy, and could readily adapt themselves to the circumstances without great sacrifice of comfort.
Simba was too sore to move for two days, but on the third day they broke their miniature encampment, and continued their journey through the mountains in a direction nearly north-west.
Tropical mountains are always grand, but during the rainy season their grandeur is enhanced. Why? Because wherever you turn your eyes you see some pinnacle, or crag, or summit buried in the angry clouds, which are a dirty grey, and ragged at the edges, but are an impenetrable mass behind of inky blackness, as if the night had been gathered and compressed into an enormous black ball ready to be hurled upon the valleys and plains by some vengeful fury. These black balls of clouds, poised upon the topmost mountain, are a feature in Central Africa; they seem to stand a moment in their precarious position, when a furious wind, which flurries everything in its way, tears along with a mighty sound, reaches the monstrous ball, lifts it up a moment above the mountains, and then hurls it upon the quiet sunlit valleys with thunder-crash and lightning, and great floods of rain.
These were of daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence, while our travellers journeyed slowly to where they conceived friends might be found. Owing to Simba’s wounds, their progress was necessarily slow, and this gave them ample opportunities to watch the phenomena we have described.
At the end of a week they were not forty miles from the Rungwa Plain, and at the termination of that period Simba declared he felt as strong and as well as ever, and the eighth day he led the way as formerly, and twenty-five miles were marched.
This day’s journey brought the travellers to a long, straight, narrow valley, which was converted through alluvial deposits and vegetable mould of centuries into a quagmire of extraordinary profundity. On the opposite side of the oozy valley to that on which they stood, there was some cultivation, and in a circular jungle they descried a few huts, probably a village. On their side the ground rose up gradually to an ancient clearing, from which disused roads ramified in all directions, which were a sufficient evidence that at one time the country was well populated.