sat down to rest and refreshment before tackling the range.

Hardly had we taken the first mouthfuls, however, when Memba Sasa,
gasping for breath, came tearing up the slope from the cañon 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 cañon 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 cañon 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