On being assured of this, I crept on my hands and knees into the jungle, dragging my hoe after me, and going feet foremost on my face for nearly a hundred yards or so, that I might with my fingers obliterate all traces of a trail; and in this, I was very successful by raising the crushed grass and shaking the bruised twigs.
At last I reached a runnel, the waters of which I knew would destroy all scent of my footsteps, and baffle the keen nostrils of those ferocious dogs, which would certainly be let slip in search of me the moment I was missed.
Assured that this runnel of water would be a tributary of the Rio Serpientes, I proceeded up its course for several miles, and in my anxiety to escape the human race forgetting all about the ferocious denizens of the African forest—the snakes and other dreadful reptiles with which the woods, the water, and the bordering deserts teemed.
I must have proceeded about ten miles without meeting either man or beast to molest or obstruct me, when evening was beginning to close, and I found myself nearly exhausted, but within a pleasant thicket of orange, citron, and chestnut trees, which bordered a pretty lake, and flourished amid the thousand flowering shrubs of this luxuriant wilderness.
The necessity for rest forced itself upon me; but I dared not sleep on the earth lest snakes might assail me, and even in a tree I was not safe from the panthers, yet I chose my couch in the latter. Furnished with a large stone, as a missile for defence in any emergency, grasping the hoe by my teeth, I clambered into a chestnut-tree, scaring therefrom a whole covey of kingfishers, copper-coloured cuckoos, and green and flame-coloured parrots.
Then selecting a place where the leafy branches were forked out from the stem, and grew in such a form that I could rest upon them with ease, and without fear of falling, I deposited the stone in a hollow of the tree, and after an hour of anxious and exciting watchfulness, gradually felt sleep stealing over me—a sleep to which the "drowsy hum" of the insects, the balmy air of the evening, the lassitude produced by my recent travel after a day's toil under a burning sun, all conduced; and so, heedless of everything, at last I slept profoundly on my awkward perch.
CHAPTER XLV.
FLIGHT.
In this precarious situation I must have been asleep for some hours, when awakened by a dreadful sound, and with a start so nervous that I nearly fell from my roost upon the long, reedy grass below.
This sound was the roaring of a lion!