neglected her. This was part of their accustomed scheme of
torment, and the woman knew it well. There was something
intolerable in their noiseless, ceaseless paddings over the
pavement. I could see the prisoner's breast heave as she watched
them. A terror such as that would have made many a victim sick and
helpless.

But this one was bolder than I had thought. She did not wait
for a spring: she made the first attack herself. When the
she-tiger made its stroll towards her, and was in the act of
turning, she flung herself into a sudden leap, striking viciously
at its eye with her sharpened bone. A roar from the onlookers
acknowledged the stroke. The cave-tiger's eye remained undarkened,
but the puny weapon had dealt it a smart flesh wound, and with a
great bellow of surprise and pain it scampered away to gain space
for a rush and a spring.

But the woman did not await its charge. With a shrill scream
she sped forward, running at the full of her speed across the
moonlight directly towards that shadowed part of the encircling
wall within whose thickness I had my gazing place; and then,
throwing every tendon of her body into the spring, made the
greatest leap that surely any human being ever accomplished, even
when spurred on by the utmost of terror and desperation. In an
after day I measured it, and though of a certainty she must have
added much to the tally by the sheer force of her run, which drove
her clinging up the rough surface of the wall, it is a sure thing
that in that splendid leap her feet must have dangled a man-height
and a half above the pavement.