09 Lion Adventure by Willard Price Page B

more about this.’
    Muttering angrily, Basa turned on his heel and strode off towards the village of Gula.
    A strong wind had come up. The Jules Verne was tugging at its trail line. The basket bounced under the feet of the two lion scouts. The dangling rope ladder whipped back and forth like the tail of a tiger. It was dangerous to stay up - it would be dangerous to go down. Anyone tossing back and forth on that ladder might lose his grip and be dashed on the stones below.
    Roger looked up at long black fingers of cloud clutching at the great bag.
    ‘Should we go down or stick it out?’
    ‘Six of one and half a dozen of the other/ said Hal. ‘Look at those animals.’
    The change in the weather had electrified everything that could move. A herd of zebras ran at full speed across the veld for no apparent good reason. Impalas that seemed to have wings in their heels soared over anthills ten feet high. The excited screaming of baboons came down the wind from the forest a quarter of a mile away. Lions that had been sleeping in the sun were roused by the chilling wind and began prowling about restlessly. The boys kept their binoculars trained on them - they might or might not be man-eaters.
    ‘Elephants!’ exclaimed Roger.
    A herd of forty or fifty of the great beasts was charging up the hill towards the village of Gula. Like a typhoon they swept in among the mud huts, not troubling to go around them, but plunging through and over them, flattening them to the ground as if they were castles of sand. Men and women came shrieking from the huts.
    ‘Come on!’ said Hal and slid down the trail line promptly followed by Roger. Hal led the way at a run to the station.
    ‘Tanga,’ he panted. ‘Elephants raiding Gula. Send up your men - with pans.’
    Then he and Roger raced to the village. Tanga acted promptly, and within a minute railway men began to stream up the path, each armed with a weapon that elephants keenly dislike - a tin pan.
    They found the villagers running about aimlessly like ants whose nest has been disturbed. The elephants were now in the village gardens, rooting up and devouring the vegetables, tearing down the coffee and fruit trees, eating and destroying, trampling with their great feet the crops that meant the difference between life and death for the village.
    Hal hastily took command of the men, lining them up side by side, then ordering them forward like an army, each one hammering on his pan with a stick or stone or bis knuckles if he had nothing better.
    The combined din was terrific and rose even above the trumpeting of the elephants. The men of the village joined in, banging on native drums.
    They were so occupied when Black Mane came on the scene. The wise old man-eater knew very well how to let elephants do a part of his work for him. When a man-eater sees a herd marching towards a village he falls in behind it. The men of the village rush out to drive away the elephants and are so busy they do not notice the skulking lion. The man-eater is then free to seize anyone who has been left behind.
    In a hut at the edge of the village a woman bent over a cooking-fire. Her husband had gone to join the fight against the elephants. In his haste he had not quite closed the door. The woman’s father, old and ill, lay on a straw mat.
    Silently, Black Mane pushed open the door, passed across the room, and fastened his jaws upon the ribs of the helpless man. The first the woman knew of it was when her father cried, ‘Lion’s got me.’
    She turned to see her father being dragged off the mat by the enormous lion. She was a brave woman. She tore a burning log from the fire and struck the lion in the face.
    Black Mane was not used to being treated in this way, especially by a woman. The flying sparks burned his eyes and the smoke made him sneeze. He dropped the man, sat back on his haunches, and looked at the woman with surprise as much as to say, ‘Don’t you
    know you’re only a woman? You’re not supposed