ock whether he saw anything, at the same time covering the
dark object as well as I could with my rifle. Brock did not answer; he
told me afterwards that he, too, thought he had seen something move,
but was afraid to say so lest I should fire and it turn out to be
nothing after all. After this there was intense silence again for a
second or two, then with a sudden bound a huge body sprang at us. "The
lion!" I shouted, and we both fired almost simultaneously--not a moment
too soon, for in another second the brute would assuredly have landed
inside the wagon. As it was, he must have swerved off in his spring,
probably blinded by the flash and frightened by the noise of the double
report which was increased a hundredfold by the reverberation of the
hollow iron roof of the truck. Had we not been very much on the alert,
he would undoubtedly have got one of us, and we realised that we had
had a very lucky and very narrow escape. The next morning we found
Brock's bullet embedded in the sand close to a footprint; it could not
have missed the lion by more than an inch or two. Mine was nowhere to
be found.

Thus ended my first direct encounter with one of the man-eaters.

CHAPTER IV

THE BUILDING OF THE TSAVO BRIDGE

During all this troublesome period the construction of the railway had
been going steadily forward, and the first important piece of work
which I had commenced on arrival was completed. This was the widening
of a rock cutting through which the railway ran just before it, reached
the river. In the hurry of pushing on the laying of the line, just
enough of the rock had originally been cut away to allow room for an
engine to pass, and consequently any material which happened to,
project outside the wagons or trucks caught on the jagged faces of the
cutting. I myself saw the door of a guard's van, which had been left
ajar, smashed to atoms in this way; and accordingly I put a gang of
rock-drillers to work at once and soon had ample room made for all
traffic to pass unimpeded. While this was going on, another gang of men
were laying the foundations of a girder bridge which was to span a
gully between this cutting and Tsavo Station. This would have taken too
long to erect when railhead was at the place, so a diversion had been
made round it, the temporary track leading down almost to the bed of
the nullah and up again on the further side. When the foundations and
abutments were ready, the gully was spanned by a