“The cubs, then, grew to be the size of spaniels, and then they became grown and were the size of hounds, and soon manes grew on them and they were the size of St. Bernards, and their eyes grew bright and shone at evening; and at last they were perfect Lions. But from a long association with Christian men they were genial, decorous, and loving, and ate nothing but cooked meat, bread, and now and then a sweetmeat. Also, they could stand up and beg. They could roar at command. They could jump over each other’s backs; they could play as many tricks as a dog. It was in this way that good came from them.
“For one day, when this man and his wife were in a better mood and had forgotten their poverty for an hour, there came to them in the carrier’s cart a parcel of wine sent them by a relative who had a vineyard. This may have been the turning of their luck: one cannot tell. Luck is above mankind. But, anyhow, they asked the carrier in and gave him wine. Now the carrier was a Mohammedan, and Mohammedans are treacherous, so when he saw two Lions walking about in a lonely house he did not call it witchcraft, as would a Christian man, but at once he offered a price for them; but the man and his wife had hearts so good they would not sell. Then the carrier changed his tune, and offered to hire them for one week and to pay for this fifty francs: this they gladly accepted. For the carrier and men like him are incapable of honour except in one small thing, which is the keeping of words and dates: in this they are most exact. So at the end of the week he brought back the Lions, and gave the man and his wife fifty francs.
“But more was to come. For the carrier (and men like him) see profit where a Christian man would not see it, and he made a proposition to these people. He said: ‘Your Lions jump through hoops, they beg for sugar, and do other entertaining things: now I will travel with you and them, and half of all we earn shall go to you.’ The man and his wife were so simple and so necessitous that they accepted, and the tour began. But That Which Watches Over Us at last rewarded the man and his wife, for within a week the carrier died, and they went on up and down the country by themselves with their children, showing the Lions, till they began to earn incredible sums. They went to the great towns and to the sea coast. At last they became so rich that they went to Algiers, and there it is, as you may imagine, large rents but larger earnings. They lived in Algiers for one year, and became at last so rich that they crossed the sea and showed their Lions in Provence, in Lyons, and would have shown them in Paris but that, by the time they reached Tournus, they came to their own people and found themselves rich enough. There the man and his wife remained, but their children, who had been born in Africa, came back, and here they are now. They have friends to dinner every day, and all on account of Lions.”
When he had done this story he added, “It is true.” Then we went on to Batna together without a word, but when we reached Batna we had dinner together and spoke of many other things, but I have space for nothing except this story of his about the lions.
|The Bargaining at Batna|
Having arrived at Batna, which is the starting-place for Timgad and also for the desert beyond, I found that there was a good road which the French had built going along a valley under Aurès, but that the distance was over twenty miles. I wasted the daylight bargaining, for no one would drive me twenty miles for less than sixteen shillings. It was late, and in my eagerness to bargain I missed the chance of a daylight march, for it was within an hour of sunset when the night driver who was to start on the Tebessa road (which runs near Timgad) a little later refused me. The poorer people whom I asked told me that no one else was going eastward along that lonely valley, but that, if I were to reach Timgad, I must make a night march of it or wait a night over in Batna itself at an inn.
|Lamboesis|
Adventure is never to be refused, so I went out eastward alone under the evening, and I was well rewarded, though I went hungry for hours and was afoot nearly all the way, for I saw a great sight under the sunset, and I met a man I shall never meet again.
The sight I saw was Lambèse, which was called Lamboesis by the Romans, and this is what stamps it upon the mind of a lonely man before nightfall: not what remains, for hardly anything remains, but that the fragments which remain of it should be so far apart.