THE'OSPREY. 



125 



Notes. 



How Two Lions Stoppp:d an Ai<*rican Rail- 

 road. Speaking- in the Honse of Lords of the 

 progress of the Uganda Railway, Lord Salisbury 

 mentioned that among the unexpected diflicul- 

 ties encountered were a pair of man-eating lions, 

 which stopped the works for three weeks, before 

 they were shot. As some five thousand men 

 were at work on the line, their intimidation by 

 two lions seemed almost incredible. Yet it is a 

 fact that so dreadful was the pressure exercised 

 by the constant attacks of this pair of man-des- 

 troj'ing wild beasts, and so cumulative the fear 

 caused among the Indian labourers by the sight 

 and sound of their comrades being dragged off 

 and devoured, that hundreds of these industri- 

 ous woi-kmen, trained on similar duties under 

 the service of the Government of India, aban- 

 doned their employment and pay, and crying- 

 out that they agreed to work for wages, not to 

 be food for lions or devils, rushed to the lines as 

 the trains for the coast were approaching-, and 

 fling-ing themselves across the metals, gave the 

 eng-ine-drivers the choice, either of passing over 

 their bodies, or of stopping to take them up and 

 carry them back to Mombasa. Many of these 

 men were not timid Hindoos, but sturdy Sikhs. 

 Yet the circumstances were so unique, and the 

 scene witnessed from week to week so bloody and 

 appalling, that their panic and desperation are 

 no matter for surprise. Lord Salisbury under- 

 stated the facts. Thougii the wor/cs were stop- 

 ped for three weeks, the lions' campaign lasted, 

 with intervals of quiet when one or other had 

 been wounded, from March till the end of 

 December. In this time they killed and ate 

 twenty-eight Indians, and it is believed at least 

 twice this number of natives, Swahilis and the 

 like; besides wounding and attacking others. 

 They attacked white engineers, doctors, soldiers, 

 and military officers, armed Abyssinian askaris, 

 sepoys, bunniahs, coolies, and porters. Some 

 they clawed, some they devoured, some they 

 carried off and left sticking" in thorn fences, 

 because they could not drag them through. At 

 first they were contented to take one man be- 

 tween them. Before the end of their career 

 they would take a man apiece on the same 

 night, sometimes from the same hut or camp- 

 fire. The plain, unvarnished tale of this "pre- 

 historic revival" of the position orig-inall}' held 

 by man in the struggle for existence ag-ainst 

 ravenous beasts is set out at considerable length 

 and detail in the Field of February I7th and 

 February 24th by Mr. J. H. Patterson, one of 

 the engineers of the line, who, after months of 

 effort and personal risk, succeeded in breaking 

 the spell, and killing both the lions, which the 

 natives had come to regard as "devils," that is, 

 as equivalent to were-wolves, and guided by the 

 local demons. 



The parallel to this storj^ of the lions which 

 stopped the rebuilding of Samaria must occur to 

 every one, and if the Samaritans had quarter as 

 g-ood cause for their fears as had the railway 

 coolies, their wish to propitiate the local deities 

 is easily understood. If the whole body of lion 

 anecdote, fi-om the days of the Assyrian Kings 

 till the last year of the nineteenth century, were 



collated and brought together, it would not 

 equal in tragedy or atrocity, in savageness or in 

 sheer insolent contempt for man, armed or un- 

 armed, white or black, the story of these two 

 beasts. The scene of their exploits was only 

 one hundred and thirtj' miles from the coast, in 

 the valley of a cool and swift stream, the Tsavos 

 River. Filled by the melting of the snow on 

 Kilimanjaro, bordered with palms and ferns, 

 and at a further distance by a dense and impas- 

 sable jungle of thorns, its banks become sud- 

 denly the camping ground of thousand of hard- 

 working Indian railwaymen, who slept in camps 

 scattered up and down the line for some eight 

 miles. Into these camps the lions came, thrust- 

 ing- their gigantic heads under the flaps of the 

 tents, or walking in at the doors of the huts. 

 Their first victim was a Sikh jemadar, taken 

 from a tent shared by a dozen other workmen, 

 the next a coolie. Then they raided the camps 

 regularly until the local length of rail was 

 finished and the bulk of the men moved up 

 country out of the lions' beat. But some hun- 

 dreds were left behind, to build bridges and do 

 permanent work. It was then that the lions' 

 i-eign of terror began, which ended in the com- 

 plete stoppage of an Imperial enterprise sup- 

 plied with ever3' mechanism and appliance of 

 civilization, from traction engines to armed 

 troops. 



Perhaps the strongest evidence of the pres- 

 sure to which the beasts subjected the dominant 

 biped man is that they forced him to become 

 arboreal. If the setting- of blood and bones 

 were not so ghastlj', the scene would provoke a 

 smile. After hundreds had fled some three hun- 

 dred still remained, for whom the eng-ineer, 

 worn out by want of sleep himself, and by con- 

 stant tracking of the lions by day and sitting 

 up by moonlight, endeavoured to find safe quar- 

 ters by nig^ht, when they mig-ht be seen "perched 

 on the top of water-tanks, roofs, and bridge- 

 girders. Fvery good-sized tree in camp had as 

 many beds lashed to it as its branches would 

 bear. So many men g-ot up a tree once when a 

 camp was attacked that it came down, the men 

 falling close to the lions. Strange to say, they 

 did not heed them, but then they were busy de- 

 vouring a man they had just seized. 



The fearful shrieks of the victims rang in 

 their ears night after night, till no one knew 

 whose turn would come next. Sound men lay 

 and listened to the cracking of bones and the 

 tearing- of limbs within fifty j'ards of the place 

 where they were, and sick men in hospital 

 expired from sheer terror as the3' listened to the 

 monsters quarrelling- over their feast. Twenty 

 shots wei-e fired in the dark at the sound of the 

 lions eating- a man, and they finished him to the 

 last bone. They would spring over the highest 

 thorn "boma," pick up a man and trot round 

 with him looking for the best way out, as a cat 

 carries a rat. Every one will ask, why were 

 these men not armed? The answer is that 

 the ordinary coolie does not know the use of 

 arms, but that, even when the lions were fii'ed 

 at, unless actually hit, they cared nothing. 

 Unlike nearly all wild beasts, they feared neither 



