aken the first mouthfuls, however, when Memba Sasa,
gasping for breath, came tearing up the slope from the canon where he
had descended for a drink. "Lions!" he cried, guardedly. "I went to
drink, and I saw four lions. Two were lying under the shade, but two
others were playing like puppies, one on its back."

While he was speaking a lioness wandered out from the canon and up the
opposite slope. She was somewhere between six and nine hundred yards
away, and looked very tiny; but the binoculars brought us up to her with
a jump. Through them she proved to be a good one. She was not at all
hurried, but paused from time to time to yawn and look about her. After
a short interval, another, also a lioness, followed in her footsteps.
She too had climbed clear when a third, probably a full-grown but still
immature lion, came out, and after him the fourth.

"You were right," we told Memba Sasa, "there are your four."

But while we watched, a fifth, again at the spaced interval, this time a
maned lion, clambered leisurely up in the wake of his family; and after
him another, and another, and yet another! We gasped, and sat down, the
better to steady our glasses with our knees. There seemed no end to
lions. They came out of that apparently inexhaustible canon bed one at a
time and at the same regular intervals; perhaps twenty yards or so
apart. It was almost as though they were being released singly. Finally
we had _fifteen_ in sight.

It was a most magnificent spectacle, and we could enjoy it unhurried by
the feeling that we were losing opportunities. At that range it would be
silly to open fire. If we had descended to the canon in order to follow
them out the other side, they would merely have trotted away. Our only
chance was to wait until they had disappeared from sight, and then to
attempt a wide circle in order to catch them from the flank. In the
meantime we had merely to sit still.

Therefore we stared through our glasses, and enjoyed to the full this
most unusual sight. There were four cubs about as big as setter dogs,
four full-grown but immature youngsters, four lionesses, and three male
lions. They kept their spaced, single file formation for two-thirds the
ascent of the hill--probably the nature of the ground forced them to
it--and then gradually drew together. Near the top, but still below the
summit, they entered a jumble of boulders and stopped. We could make out
several of them lying down. One fine old yellow fe