attack, but the creature had had enough and it fled at top speed,
bellowing.... He, however, did not budge: he was waiting for the
female... as happened in all his books. Unfortunately the female failed
to turn up, and after two or three hours of waiting Tartarin became
tired. The ground was damp, the night was growing cool, there was a nip
in the breeze from the sea... "Perhaps I should have a nap while I wait
for daylight" he said to himself, and to provide some shelter he had
recourse to the bivouac tent. A difficulty now arose, the bivouac tent
was of such an ingenious design that he was quite unable to erect it. He
struggled and sweated for a long time, but there was no way in which he
could get the thing up, so at last he threw it on the ground and lay on
top of it, cursing it in Provencal.

Ta!... Ta!... Ta!... Tarata! "Ques aco?" said Tartarin, waking up with a
start. It was the trumpets of the Chasseurs d'Afrique sounding reveille
in the barracks at Mustapha. The lion killer rubbed his eyes in
amazement. He who had believed that he was in the middle of a
desert... do you know where he was?... In a field full of artichokes,
between a cauliflower and a swede... his Sahara was a vegetable patch.

Nearby, on the pretty green coast of upper Mustapha, white Algerian
villas gleamed in the dawn light, one might have been among the suburban
houses in the outskirts of Marseille. The bourgeois appearance of the
sleeping countryside greatly astonished Tartarin and put him in a bad
humour. "These people are crazy", he said to himself, "To plant their
artichokes in an area infested by lions. For I was not dreaming, there
are lions here and there is the proof".

The proof was a trail of blood which the fleeing beast had left behind
it. Following this blood-spoor, with watchful eye and revolver in hand,