At the second repetition the lions paused. None better than they knew what was the meaning of that hiss. They had heard it before in their native hunting-grounds in the earlier days of summer, when the first heat lay close over all the jungle like the hollow of the palm of an angry god. Or if they themselves had not heard it, their sires before them had, and the fear of the thing bred into their bones suddenly leaped to life at the sound and gripped them and held them close.
When for a third time the sound sung and shrilled in their ears, their heads drew between their shoulders, their great eyes grew small and glittering, the hackles rose and stiffened on their backs, their tails drooped, and they backed slowly to the further side of the cage and cowered there, whining and beaten.
Toppan wiped the sweat from the inside of his hands and went into the cage with the keepers and gathered up the panting, broken body, with its twitching fingers and dead, white face and ears, and carried it out. As they lifted it, the handful of pitiful medals dropped from the shredded, gray coat and rattled down upon the floor. In the silence that had now succeeded, it was about the only sound one heard.
As we sat that evening on the porch of Toppan’s house, in a fashionable suburb of the city, he said, for the third time: “I had that trick from a Mpongwee headman,” and added: “It was while I was at Victoria Falls, waiting to cross the Kalahari Desert.”
Then he continued, his eyes growing keener and his manner changing: “There is some interesting work to be done in that quarter by some one. You see, the Kalahari runs like this”—he drew the lines on the ground with his cane—“coming down in something like this shape from the Orange River to about the twentieth parallel south. The aneroid gives its average elevation about six hundred feet. I didn’t cross it at the time, because we had sickness and the porters cut. But I made a lot of geological observations, and from these I have built up a theory that the Kalahari is no desert at all, but a big, well-watered plateau, with higher ground to the east and west. The tribes, too, thereabout call the place ‘Linoka-Noka’ and that’s the Bantu for rivers upon rivers. They’re nasty, though, these Bantu, and gave us a lot of trouble. They have a way of spitting little poisoned thorns into you unawares, and your tongue swells up and turns blue and your teeth fall out and——”
His wife Victoria came out on the porch in evening-dress.
“Ah, Vic,” said Toppan, jumping up, with a very sweet smile, “we were just talking about your paper-german next Tuesday, and I think we might have some very pretty favors made out of white tissue-paper—roses and butterflies, you know.”
THE RACE BOND
By Gwendolen Overton